The voice of the fans: Salford Lads Club, a community project and the Mancunian pop band The Smiths

Kid: Why do you call yourselves “The Smiths”? 

Morrissey: Because it was the most ordinary name 

and I think it's time the ordinary folk of the world show their faces. 

– Morrissey and Johnny Marr interviewed by kids, 1984, 

https://youtu.be/M6VbSEm8nY0. 

Salford is a city just across the centre of Manchester; bus 50 takes you past the River Irwell to the University of Salford in less than 15 minutes. A little longer and you’ll arrive at one of Greater Manchester’s most ambitious and expensive building complexes: Salford Quay’s Media City, home of the BBC North and iTV. In the trajectory you’ll notice the contrast between the bustle of the highly populated centre of Manchester, with its contrast of Victorian architecture and new, ultra-modern developments, such as the Beetham Tower. Salford is quiet in comparison, even slightly desolated.

Walk away from the main roads, into the city, and you’ll notice this is the part of town where the sustainability discourse hasn’t reached; a place where the old toxic industrial fumes from the Manchester of the 1800s are still running, their black smoke directed towards the sky, their buzz vibrating. You’ll walk past homogeneous Victorian style houses with the orange-red of their bricks, and about ten blocks from the University you’ll arrive at the Salford Lads Club.

You’ll recognize it because it will be full of tourists taking pictures at the door and until late 2016, some of them arriving in groups as part of the Manchester Music Tours* that makes an unavoidable stop here, while the neighbours, chatting and drinking on the sidewalks, look at you with the bored expression someone too familiar with the visitors.

Once in, the main hall has an informative panel with the history of the place; medals and photographs of the founders and the members hang on the walls. One of the administrators will greet you in a thick Mancunian accent, and will tell you about the century old project that has been gathering people together around cultural activities, especially youngsters from poor areas. He will tell you the founder later established the Scouts, and will let you know a detailed story of each member whose photograph hangs on the hall.



As you realize the pride and affection the people have for this place, your attention will divert to the groups of tourists who gather at the door of a tiny room by the basketball hall. It’s the room-museum dedicated to The Smiths, the pop group from the 1980s that made this club famous until this day via their visual and lyrical imagery. Starting with the band’s photograph in the insert of their 1986 LP The Queen Is Dead, a picture that also illustrates the band’s main entry on their Wikipedia page, their video Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, from their 1987 album Strangeways, Here We Come, pays the type of homage to the city of Salford and its Lads Club that it soon turned into legend among the group’s fans, who pay a visit from all over the world. This video shows Morrissey leading a team of his look-alike fans from the centre of Manchester to the streets of Salford, all of them riding bicycles and wandering around on a typical cloudy day.

The Queen Is Dead insert, 1986 

The main room dedicated to The Smiths is a messy display of fans expressing their love for the band in various forms, mostly written or drawn: posters, photographs, newspaper clippings and post-its form a colourful wallpaper that covers the four walls, as well as the ceiling. The messages are endearing: people remembering when they bought their first Smiths record, the gigs they attended, the mixtapes recorded for their valentines or friends. And then there are the messages directed to Morrissey, the only member of the Smiths who reached wide international success until this day, after the band disintegrated in 1987.

Salford Lads Club, The Smiths Room, Photo by Nayma Gonzalez ©

Salford Lads Club, The Smiths Room, Photo by Nayma Gonzalez ©

But what’s the story of this community centre? Opened in 1903 as a boys club, it’s served for more than a century as a gathering spot for vulnerable youth in what was one of the poorest areas of Northern England during the economic recession that hit the United Kingdom during the Margaret Thatcher government, and the antisocial programs of this administration that caused high levels of unemployment and poverty.

The great paradox of this era is that it was also one of the most fertile moments for artistic expressions; music in particular empowered “ordinary folk” to express themselves. This is how the punk movement, as well as post-punk and the new wave originated. The Smiths is one of the many bands formed by working-class people who took the stage and the microphone only to inspire generations of others to do the same.

It makes sense that the stories written by Morrissey, all inspired by real life and an angst against all types of authority, found a rich source of inspiration in what was happening at Salford Lads Club during those times, and how this place saved the lives of many youngsters. Until this day, Morrissey donates a substantial quantity of money to this club.

The stories of the fans within the story of The Smiths, related to the story of the Salford Lads Club and the greater narrative of this city in the Thatcher era of the 1980s, are intertwined stories of great sociocultural interest as well as deeply personal stories moved by a band whose legacy is no other than having given a voice to the voiceless. 

Visit: https://salfordladsclub.org.uk/ 
http://www.manchestermusictours.com/ 
https://www.morrissey-solo.com/ (Morrissey fan site designed by him as his official site). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SckD99B51IA Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before.

* Founded and operated by the Craig Gill (drummer with 1980s Manchester band Inspiral Carpets) until his death in November 2016. Manchester Music Tours is now operated by his daughter.

Article originally published: https://web.archive.org/web/20180628162135/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/the-voice-of-the-fans-salford-lads-club-a/58bf4f7f50cef72fd3c34b71 

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Manchester Day 2016: a celebration of one of Europe’s most progressive and innovative cities

June 19th was the Manchester celebration day, choosing the Archimedes famous old exclamation Eureka as a slogan and parade theme for the festivities, which were closely related with the city’s penchant for discovery, technology and science, in an environment of fun for both children and adults.

The parade stopped at the city’s main points of reference, such as Albert Square, St Ann’s Square, Exchange Square and the Great Northern Square. In each of them there were activities such as circus acts, bands and artists playing jazz, folk, swing and opera, photography competitions, as well as science-based activities sponsored by the Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Manchester and the University of Salford-Manchester.

As the Multicultural city it is, a band of locals dove into the tropical rhythms of Brazilian samba to the delight of an audience that didn’t mind the incessant rain. Arabian sounds were present too at the Great Northern Square, for the recognition and the delight of the vast Arabic population living in the city. Carousels full of children and the elderly taken care of by their grandchildren, joined together for the festivities that included various culinary dishes, as well as barrels of delicious ales.

Recently named “European City of Science for 2016”, Manchester is a somewhat small but incredibly significant city with plenty of reasons to feel proud of and celebrate. One of the centres of the Industrial Revolution, it’s known worldwide for its contributions in the foundation of various industries that changed the world since the 19th century: engineering, textiles, communications… you name it.

The establishment of Manchester as a nucleus for industrial production turned it into one of the most polluted and toxic cities of the 19th century. A few years later, when Britain was at war and most of its cities were destroyed by the German offensive, there was not another option but to reconstruct. Manchester in the 1960s saw a surge of utopian visions of a futuristic city that never came to be, such as the plans for a subway network and the few family complexes that were built with disastrous results, like the Hulme Crescents development that was demolished in the 1990s.

The crisis of the mid 1970s until the last years of the Thatcher era turned the city into a grim place to live, polluted, with no jobs and plenty of violence, conditions that ironically were the fuel for a resurgence of a cultural resistance in the fields of art and specifically, music, because an undisputable source of Mancunian pride is its history of seminal rock bands that redefined the genre in one of the darkest political periods of the country. The Buzzcocks, Joy Division and the whole roster of Factory Records, New Order, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and later Oasis, are all expressions of a disenchanted youth that reclaimed their city from hopelessness.

Aware of its place in modernity, the city promotes its history in various museums that are free for visitors, such as the Museum of Science and Industry, which displays in two redesigned buildings some of the first machines built for mass production, or the early vapour locomotive machines that changed forever the mercantile relationships in the modern world.

The People’s History Museum celebrates another type of progressive agenda: the conquer of rights since the 19th century, such as the female vote, the workers unions and other types of organizations that at the time were considered so clandestine and dangerous, that protesters were massacred simply for gathering and demanding rights that we take for granted nowadays.

More recently, the museum shows the conquest of human rights by the LGBT collective, one that has a large and significant presence in the city, with its own officially recognised Gay Village area of museums, bars, cafés and night clubs that promote the inclusion of all people, regardless of their sexual orientation. The city is so tolerant and diversity-affirming that it officially promotes the adoption of children by same-sex couples:

Moss Lane East, Manchester. Caption reads: "Complete your family. Adopt with Manchester. manchester.gov.uk/adoption". Billboard sponsored by the city. Photo: Nayma Gonzalez.

Proud of its history in the field of innovation, Manchester, through its two main universities, is leading some of the most important scientific research taking place in the world, such as the treatment of graphene as the material of the future (it’s been called “the wonder material”), for its amazing properties that have the potential to revolutionize, again, most of the industries of our time.

Take for example the ultra-modern The National Graphene Institute, a building at the University of Manchester, advertised as “Manchester’s Revolutionary 2D Material”, and built after many years of research led by physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who won the 2010 Nobel prize for isolating this material. The building cost 61 million pounds, funded by the UK government and the European Union via the European Regional Development Fund, which is also funding the revitalisation of the central avenue of the universities zone, Oxford Road.

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47757711

Local investment can be found in other massive projects: The Media City in Salford (approximate cost: 1 billion pounds), only 30 minutes from the centre of Manchester, and now home to the country’s most important media corporations, such as the BBC and ITV. 

MediaCityUK. Photo: Nayma Gonzalez.

The already completed Birley Fields campus of the Manchester Metropolitan University in the Hulme area of the city. This ultra-modern and sustainable building cost around 150 million pound and was designed by Sheppard Robson, an UK architecture firm that was influential in the 1950s and 1960s, and now champions sustainable architecture:

Source: http://www.sir-robert-mcalpine.com/projects/?id=64115

A work in progress is the University of Manchester Engineering campus, a 350 million pound large complex that will open in 2020 and is being built by Dutch firm Mecanoo. In front of the Graphene Institute and next to the Manchester Aquatics Centre, the Engineering campus will be a five stories building, with an extension of about 78,000m2 that will connect the universities zones with the centre of Manchester. If the renders are completed, this building will probably have one the largest horizontal roof gardens in any ultra-modern building.
More information:
http://manchesterday.co.uk/manchester-day/
More photos of the Birley campus:
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/business/revealed-new-140m-manchester-metropolitan-7866638

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10 years of Caja Negra, independent publishers from Argentina

After Spain, Argentina is the biggest market for literature in Spanish. With a rich tradition of mainstream and independent publishers, a demanding readership and various fares, like the Buenos Aires annual international book fair (Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires), the field of literature in this country remains in good condition despite its frequently convulsed economy.

With so much competition, it’s hard to find a specific audience and begin building a catalog. Caja Negra has been doing so for the last ten years. Just like the case of Mexican Sexto Piso, Caja Negra was set up by two friends with no particular plans to get a formal job, and instead a dreamed occupation based on personal interests and taste was the basis for this publishing house. No marketing and no business plan: just the intuition that if you publish what you love reading, others will want to read it too. They were right.

Raised in the 1980s, Diego Esteras and Ezequiel Fanego’s cultural baggage is composed in equal parts by Latin American literature, universal classics, philosophy and pop culture. They’re far from the high brow/low brow distinction that’s still prevalent in the field of literature. Inspired by a Ballard quote, they’re following their obsessions and what they know. They’re publishing what they want to read. The result? A diverse catalog where British postpunk and Baruch Spinoza, among others, compose an exchange of ideas no one else believed possible before the editors. In their words, Caja Negra is “an invitation to compose heterodox traditions”.

Just like in pop music it was immediately recognizable anything signed by labels such as the British 4AD or Creation (hence the phrase “a 4AD sound”), Esteras and Fanego want their published products to have a signature, to be a discourse, something that distinguishes them but mostly, something that makes their readers maintain their trust in their judgment. A literary “selecta” of sorts, Caja Negra bases its accomplishments in something intangible and hard to pin down, just like a rare night when you find a DJ with the right vinyls.

It’s easier to compare the publishers to DJs or music label directors than to other literary publishers because it’s precisely music the most distinguishable topic in their catalog, specifically music criticism, a discourse that has plenty of readership in English, but it’s marginalized to newspapers, magazines or websites in Spanish. Their best seller remains “After Rock” by Simon Reynolds, the English music journalist, following an editorial line that proves to be a very demanded one, not only in terms of what can be translated, but what can be published by local music critics and read by an avid audience searching for quality criticism.
According to the publishers, in the current era of digital and traditional publishing, it’s the taste and the signature of an editorial house what can set it apart from competitors, and not the format. In Esteras and Fanego’s case, it’s also a sense of boredom what will tell them it’s time to move on to another project and not develop and rely on a tried formula. However, the format of their books is carefully chosen. A Caja Negra collector will probably take care of the books as of they were small pieces of art, with independence of their content.
This poses a problem, though: expensive and rare books sooner or later are only read by those who can afford/find them. This is a problem especially in the Latin American market, where art or rare books are expensive and public libraries will rarely have them in their catalogs.
Yet a sense of elitism has surrounded this editorial house since its founding. Its carefully selected subjects have been translated to attract a specific audience in mind. Back to Simon Reynolds, a sort of godfather of Caja Negra, has now three translated books (“Postpunk”, “Retromanía”, “Después del Rock”), but just as rare is Vilém Flusser’s “El universo de las imágenes técnicas”, the Czech journalist’s compiled academic writings from his 30 years of activity as a teacher in Sao Paulo.
The world of cinema is well represented with the works of other Latin American authors dismissed by big publishing houses, such as Brazilian Glauber Rocha, the man whose films and theoretical writings composed a revolutionary political and aesthetic manifesto known as Cinema Novo (“new cinema”). Caja Negra’s “La revolución es una EZTETIKA” compiles the early thinking of Rocha, as well as interviews and other articles written during his lifetime.

Rocha was radically opposed to the “aesthetic colonization” of Hollywood, just as much as “realism” in cinema, which he thought was nothing but a manifestation of the bourgeois. With his texts and his images, he wanted to confront the spectator with images of misery, pain and hunger. A must for scholars and fans of cinema in general, is his seminal text of the 1970s “La estética del hambre” (“the aesthetics of hunger”), as well as “La revolución del Cinema Novo” and “El siglo del cine”, two other important articles that have been dispersed until now.

Other film figures appear in Caja Negra’s catalog, such as a collection of Ed Wood’s articles for various magazines, from Science Fiction to sex fantasies. Wood belongs to the cult “Z genre” of film, characterized by low budget production and mediocre scripts that have gained validation by their viewers. If anything, Ed Wood’s texts are an extension of the cinematic interests and abilities of the late American director.

Two really interesting books that will capture the attention of scholars and a larger audience are the recently deceased German filmmaker and theoretician Harun Farocki’s “Desconfiar de las imágenes” (roughly, “To mistrust images”), whose work has had a re-emergence in various exhibitions and publications. Another German filmmaker, Wim Wenders, has in “Los pixels de Cezanne” a collection of essays about his early relation to painting and other filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni. Wenders, in writing about his early loves and influences, perhaps delivers the best type of autobiography there can be.

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A report from ComicInvasionBerlin in its 5th anniversary

If there’s anything empowering about comics is that you can just grab a pen and a piece of paper to express yourself. You can also join others like you and form gatherings of people with common interests, developing a community that will probably continue to grow. That’s the case of most indie comic festivals, communities that attract audiences that will sometimes turn into creators and vice versa.

CIB was once a street mini comics festival, but after five years, it has grown into a two- week event that’s visited by about 7000 people, and has important visitors while focusing on a central topic each year. While most of the activities and published books are in German, CIB can be considered a local festival that welcomes international visitors and debates.

The activities are more or less the same that can be found in any book fair: presentations, panel discussions, contests, exhibitions, gatherings, book signings, drawing battles, workshops, concerts… But what’s particular about indie comics is the ease with which it addresses certain causes, and the sense that anyone can join the debate, regardless of credentials.

This year’s central topic is the refugee crisis, represented in the activities but most significantly, in the work of some of the artists. For instance, the official poster was designed by Ali Fitzgerald (http://www.alifitzgerald.net/), an US artist currently based in Berlin, who administers a comics workshop for refugees. The poster shows what seems to be a migrant whose possessions are being eaten by sharks and crocodiles, while she barely escapes the jaws of the animals, in a clear allusion to the path of the Syrian and Iraqi refugees across the ocean.

Art as a form of inclusion and expression of refugees into their new surroundings is driven by many workshops established in shelters across Berlin. It even has a phrase: “Drawing as Voice”. Indeed, drawing as a form of basic expression allows not only the refugees to express what the limits of language cannot, but also it invites their readers to understand and share their sense of misplacement and trauma, and hopefully, to get over the recurrent prejudice enforced by some politicians and the media.

The CIB gives space to individual authors but is currently promoting the work of collectives, and these are some of the most interesting comics seen during the festival’s main activities and its satellite program:

Swiss artist Alex Baladi’s personal stories (https://alexbaladi.wordpress.com/) are associated with the Comix 2000 book that was translated in the U.S. by Fantagraphics. Baladi, like the dozens of authors published in Comix 2000, tested the possibilities of wordless images. This bande dessinée author has over 20 publications and has been active since the early 1990s. His exhibition at the Supalife gallery was a collection of wordless comics, or simple illustrations (with no distinguishable narrative) about the extraordinary in the mundane, such as his piece of clothes hanging in a remote island.

Brazilian Augusto Paim’s (http://www.cartoonmovement.com/p/5845/comics) comic journalism follows the trend established by Joe Sacco. With “So close, faraway!”, presented at Renate Comics, he focuses on the crisis of the homeless in Brazil.

Collective “Drawing the line – Dissenting voices in contemporary comics” (http://www.neurotitan.de/Galerie/Archiv/2016/160409_Drawing%20The%20Line.html) honors its name and their exhibition at Neurotitan gallery showed the works of Rebecca Rosen (http://cargocollective.com/rebeccarosen/MAIDENHEADLOCK), Akvile Magicdust (http://www.akvilemagicdust.com/), Paula Bulling (http://paulabulling.net/), Radical Jetset, Marlene Krause (http://marlenekrause.blogspot.com), Tine Fetz (http://www.tinefetz.net/), Max Beitinger and Barrack Lima. These artists confronted a series of questions, such as their work responding to the rise of the new extreme right in Europe, the diversity of the comic scene and comics in the market of capitalist society.

Paula Bulling’s work about the Syrian refugees on a camp, called “Lesvos, November 2015” depicts the horrific experience of displaced families and the undignified conditions of how they’re treated. Barrack Rima is a Lebanese comic artist whose stories from home have an expressionism quality to emphasize the hostility of the local authorities. Written in Arabic and French, his comics are also made of collages.

Max Batinger in a German drawer whose work is mostly abstract images without text. His line of work is similar of Canadian Marc Bell with detailed his compositions. Tine Fetz is one of the most interesting artists of this collective. Born in Germany, she combines hand-drawn and digital illustrations to portray social subjects as well as personal stories that will immediately remind you of the Hernandez brothers in their Love & Rockets period.

LGBT topics were represented by the Superqueeroes, a collective-exhibition that is appropriating the massively popular genre of superheroes. Superqueeroes is about heroes and heroines observed in already existent mainstream comics, such as X-Men and characters like Catwomen, and also created on the basis of ordinary people’s lives and their acts of struggle and resistance in a hetero-normative world.

The exhibition presents work by well-known LGBT artists such as Tom of Finland, Alison Bechdel, Ralf König, Wolfgang Müller, as well as newcomers Megan Rose Gedris (http://rosalarian.com/), Erika Moen (http://www.erikamoen.com/), Elizabeth Beier (http://www.elizabethdrewyou.com/new-blog/), Theo Van Den Boogaard (http://www.theovandenboogaard.nl/), Simon Bosch (http://simonbosch.de/), Jennifer Camper with her Hernandez Bros. style (http://www.jennifercamper.com/home/) and Kylie Summer Wu (http://transgirlnextdoor.tumblr.com/), among many others. These new artists will often portray known LBGT artists as heroes and heroines. While not necessarily LGBT themselves, some of the artists contribute to the exhibition in solidarity.

But it is perhaps the collective action of people’s drawing what results the most satisfying, specially for those not used to any means of expression. Children and adults get together in the early stages of the Berlin spring, draw cardboard murals and create scale models with the most diverse of subjects in what is already one of the most significant areas of Berlin: the Haus Schwarzenberg (https://www.circus-berlin.de/fabisch-history/), which, like most parts of the city, still reminds of the horrors of the war and the at the same time, the efforts to rebuild the city, a task in which art and culture are the fundamental pillars.

For more information and photos, go to: http://www.comicinvasionberlin.de/ 

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Sarah Lund, noir ruler. A commentary of the three seasons of Danish TV series Forbrydelsen.

(May contain spoilers)

Nordic noir has reinvented the crime and police genre, creating cultural products that have proved to be massively successful in Europe through official partnerships, and not so official broadcasting channels where some series have acquired a cult following of fans from all over the world.

Such is the case of Danish TV series Forbrydelsen, already a hit home when it became famous in the United Kingdom, Germany and The Netherlands in part for its vertiginous narrative, but mostly because of its main star, Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lund, a peculiar woman of many complexities, played by the very talented Sofie Grabol, previously known in art cinema circles for her work with the likes of Lars von Trier and the Dogma manifesto.

Grabol’s acting has given depth to a character that is at once hesitant but resolute, strong, not necessarily “feminine” or in possession of psychological attributes and behaviors associated with the female gender. For instance, she’s detached and her lack of communicative skills isolates her from personal and professional surroundings. Her motivations aren’t always easy to read and the sometimes flawed decisions in her personal relationships turn her into a three dimensional character full of dilemmas, contradictions, mistakes and difficult decisions in a field where men make the rules.

Sarah Lund became a female hero since the introductory pilot, where her professional vacillations quickly collided against her firmness to solve the murder of a teenage girl named Nanna Birk Larsen. The episode plays, almost until the end, with the notion of an insecure professional who also has personal issues with her boyfriend, son and mother, and who can’t make up her mind and decide what her priorities are. Messy with her blue jeans, a cardigan, a ponytail and no make-up, she’s not the typical female TV lead, but Lund fulfills the principle of verisimilitude by going against the representation of female detectives who chase criminals in high heels and look like tall, skinny super models, so typical in many American crime shows.

Sarah simply looked and acted familiar, and it was easy to sympathize with her. But she was also intriguing. She’d choose a dangerous path, following her intuition, as the spectator knew something bad was about to happen. The closing scene of episode 1, when she grabs her bag and gets off the plane to go back to her Danish office, quitting her transfer to the Swedish police, interrupts a series of long edits and sets a fast narrative for the upcoming episodes, where Sarah sets the rhythm. The case of Nanna Birk Larsen will develop for the whole season, and in another defiance of the genre’s clichés, the individual story will soon signify the slow disintegration of her immediate circle and all the way to the circuit of politics, where corruption and double standards will mirror the individual tragedy.

“The personal is political”, or so seems to be the show’s stand, going against a trend of storytelling that detaches the individual crime from society. Forbrydelsen shows us that a single crime hurts society as a whole, but it’s also a product of it. Sarah is assigned to the case with her partner, detective Jan Meyer. Following leads that go all the way to the Prime Minister and back, both Lund and Meyer get to unravel the identity of the killer, at the expense of risking everything. Tragedy strikes again and, despite having solved the murder, Lund, now investigated by her bosses, is punished and degraded to a traffic officer in the first episode of Season 2.

The murder of Nanna Birk Larsen seems to have been written following what statistics show all over the world: that the perpetrator is in most cases someone close to the victim. It took Sarah many false leads, a loss of her own and the political elite upside down to finally catch the killer, his own pathology rooted in a broken family and childhood.

By the second season, the production of episodes was reduced by half, and Sarah, now investigating a series of gruesome murders by an apparent serial killer, goes through her worst personal decisions, almost to the point of auto-sabotage, and getting killed by them. A weak season by comparison, Sarah’s personal struggles and blindness at love are the focus of the storyline, with a villain too wicked and too hard to believe. A point in favor is the commentary on international politics, in particular Denmark’s participation in the war against Afghanistan is portrayed as a foolish decision that resulted in the senseless murder of Afghan civilians and the fractured minds of the soldiers upon their return.

But it is the third and last season that remains the most controversial. The young daughter of a prominent industrialist is kidnapped by a man hungry for vengeance. The story focuses on the bitter battle of her parents against each other as they’re desperate to find her, and the plan of the kidnapper reveals a horrific case of pedophilia in the hands of an apparently respectable man. Such tragedy is framed by a wider political context, just like the previous seasons, as the 3rd ends with Sarah facing the limits of justice and reason. What to do when you’re facing a monster, knowing he will get away with a crime?

Intertwined with her own personal demons, her fractured relationship with her son and a second opportunity at love, Forbrydelsen’s finale poses many moral dilemmas in an open ending that manages to portray Sarah with all her contradictions. She’s a hero and an antihero at the same time. The last five minutes of the episode have no dialogue, but the resolution comes from the story that Grabol’s face is expressing as she’s staring at the killer, who stares back in those harrowing, empty eyes. Perhaps one of the best acting moments of Sophie Grabol and an unexpected but satisfying end to one of the best female characters of crime TV.

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Jessica Jones TV series

Jessica Jones TV series, episode 1: rethinking the superhero

From comics to television
The history of comics shows this is a cultural field of ideological tensions, where mainstream ideologies have been contested, criticized and parodied since the early years of the comic strip until our days. One of the most challenging was the poetic and elegant defiance of gender stereotypes composed by George Herriman in his Krazy Kat comic strip. The rich epoch of the sixties counterculture in the United States, was one of sexual liberation where irreverence became almost the norm for male artists, while females found in comics a platform of self-expression in the Wimmen’s Comix movement.

The self-awareness of narratives was prevalent in the eighties, where genres were re-thought and intervened in what have become now classics, such as Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. What most of these manifestations have in common is that they appeared in the margins of the comics industry, creating sub-genres and movements that eventually become assimilated by the mainstream industry, which saw an area of opportunity for business, with new narratives that could attract new readers.

Such is the case of Jessica Jones, a comic originally published by Marvel that intended to shift some gender stereotypes. Along with a new roster of super heroes created for contemporary times and branded by Marvel as “New Avengers” series, Jessica Jones has been adapted to other mediums such as film, video games, literature and most recently, television.

This article will discuss episode 1 of the TV adaptation of Jessica Jones, with a focus on its genre and gender subversions.
Created in 2015 by Melissa Rosenberg as a web television series produced by Netflix, Jessica Jones, played by Krysten Ritter, is the story of a grumpy, alcoholic and disheveled private investigator suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Jessica, we learn as the series progress, possesses strange physical powers but has quit them after a traumatic event. She is now in search of a common, more anonymous life and has a struggling business, set up from her impoverished home/office.

Jessica’s skills as an investigator gain from her unique superhero capabilities, despite her trying to suppress them. She’s introduced as a disenchanted and sometimes cynical character walking through the streets of New York City and entering a posh office. She shows no respect for figures of authority and no plans to improve her personal and professional circumstances. Downplaying herself, she interacts only with strictly necessary characters in the first episode, especially the source of her most important jobs: Jeri Hogarth, a powerful female defense lawyer with questionable ethics.

The first five minutes of episode 1 shows no male characters, and instead displays two powerful women interacting with each other, one as a freelance investigator and the other as the owner of her law firm. The first subversion of the series is the lack of reliance on male characters, and a display of women overtaking traditionally male-dominated work ambiences. A second subversion is the representation of these women’s appearance: Jessica is scruffy, wears little make-up and has a leather jacket, blue jeans motorbike type of style; Jeri wears a skirt and short hair. None of them fall into stereotypes of femininity. However, the politics of power are intact in the representation of Jeri’s assistants: two stereotypical feminine women in their assigned work space.

Jessica’s first night at the job makes this superhero genre show intersect with a noir detective genre where ambience and mood enhance the story as well as the character’s personality. The dark streets of NYC echo Jessica’s solitude, misanthropy and stalkerish proclivities, as one of the main male characters is introduced: watched in an objectified kind of way by Jessica (a third subversion), Luke Cage has superhero powers and will become Jessica’s object of desire.

Superheroes have been traditionally represented as ordinary people who go through an extraordinary event and gain extraordinary powers from them. In this sense, Jessica Jones is a conventional character, as her struggles and suffering have the function of making her more convincingly human. PTSD isn’t new either; but its ramifications are: rarely we have seen the routines of an alcoholic protagonist in a state of desperation. Jessica’s health issue make her more human and believable, but more importantly, it is displayed on television without mockery or alarmism, and the camera’s angle portrays it accordingly:

Picture 1: Jessica’s world is upside down

Secondary characters (her neighbors) are introduced. They’re all misfits, but portrayed in a way that makes the audience feel empathy and closeness for them,  as they limit Jessica’s self-destructiveness. Marginal characters assigned to the narrative can be considered another subversion, despite how common this is now in the field of comics. But TV is a different issue, going through its own rearranging of genres and narrative possibilities.

Despite her troubles, Jessica is a competent and fearless P.I., especially when male characters want to dominate her. Sexual practices show other subversions: seduction and copulation are represented without TV’s traditional conservatism of the act being suggested instead of shown. Jeri’s lesbian affair and relationship are introduced without delicacy or soft tones; Jessica seeks, gets and dominates her lover. Jessica is proactive in her desires, represented in a frontal and loud way.  While this can be considered a gender subversion, Jessica’s white privilege over her black lover has provoked reactions. https://www.themarysue.com/race-in-jessica-jones/

Trish Walker’s introduction is the most deceptive of all: She looks stereotypically feminine, has a successful job as a radio host and enjoys the comforts of her luxury NYC condo, with its panic room and reinforced security. Jessica’s sister is apparently her opposite: blonde, rich, physically fit, a public person. Yet, all these stereotypes hide a vulnerable woman who shares Jessica’s past and deepest secrets, and like her sister, refuses to be a victim. Their interaction has a narrative function, as it introduces the villain of the series without actually showing him. 

This ominous character is coming back for Jessica, via her job. He’s using a vulnerable young woman reported as lost to get to Jessica, victimizing and taking away the woman’s autonomy. This suggests how powerful he is before he’s even introduced. As Jessica tries to rescue this girl and her parents, a shocking murder sequence closes the pilot episode. This proves devastating for our heroine, while at the same time detonating her come back to her superhero senses and resolution to face and destroy her nemesis.

The pilot of Jessica Jones progresses in an engaging narrative and successfully introduces the characters, their motivations and their life and work environments, while shifting gender stereotypes in the mass communication media that is television. While there is an imbalance of gender and race issues, these are now part of a collective discussion that should be welcome. 
Archived version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180628162131/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/jessica-jones-tv-series-episode-1-rethinking-the/56c2a1d9acd0d072fda38e2e

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