7 Will Simpson and the Failure of Militarized Masculinity

Brett Pardy

Jessica Jones (2015–19) uses the superhero genre as a vehicle through which to examine trauma. It is primarily an empathetic and complicated portrayal of Jessica’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after she was subjected to mind control by Kilgrave, who uses his victims to further his hedonistic lifestyle. Jessica’s interactions while facing the source of her trauma, and working to prevent it from happening to anyone else, lead her into contact with other traumatized characters. One of these is New York City Police sergeant Will Simpson, who is sent, under Kilgrave’s mind control, to kill Trish Walker (ep. 1.03, “AKA It’s Called Whiskey”). Jessica manages to fool Simpson into thinking he has accomplished his task, and then saves his life when Kilgrave orders him to walk off a roof. When Simpson returns to a lucid state, he seems a potential ally. He is horrified thinking about what he has done, declaring, “I’m a goddamned monster” (ep. 1.04, “AKA 99 Friends”). To atone, he offers his “eight years special ops [experience] and an entire police force” (ep. 1.04, “AKA 99 Friends”) to Jessica’s cause against Kilgrave. Yet this supposed aid reveals he has his own traumatic past, not simply from his time controlled by Kilgrave, but also from the very training he presents as an asset.

Through engaging with Simpson’s trauma, Jessica Jones deconstructs the conventional militarized masculine hero, interrogating how the trauma produced by militarism affects such men, rather than ignoring it as much of popular culture does. In many narratives, Simpson, a tall, muscular, white, cisgender man in the police with a background in the military, would be the idealized protagonist, mirroring how the soldier is often portrayed as the ideal citizen (Taber 2016). The military is celebrated as producing the ideal skills of the neoliberal citizen: self-reliance, discipline, the abilities to both take charge of a situation and to follow orders in a meritocratic hierarchy. This is not merely a conservative position, as Bacevich (2013) emphasizes: self-declared progressives see the military “not as an obstacle to social change but as a venue in which to promote it, pointing the way for the rest of society on matters such as race, gender, and sexual orientation” (25). This way of thinking was exemplified on the November 15, 2015, episode of The Late Show when liberal icon Stephen Colbert told two veterans, Jake Wood and Eric Greitens, working on reintegrating veterans into society through community service, “I think it would be wonderful if there were more people in government who had served in our military because they do have the training to organize and to lead people.”

This type of thinking is what Cynthia Enloe (2016) defines as militarization, “a process by which a person or thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (3). As neoliberal policies increase economic inequality in the United States, the military is promoted “to contrive a sentimentalized version of the American military experience and an idealized image of the American soldier. . . . They enable us to sustain the belief that . . . [America is] bringing peace and light to troubled corners of the earth” (Bacevich 2013, 97–8). This works to convince the population that the United States is the ideal model for the world, that everywhere else has worse conditions, and that the country is committed to improving everyone’s lives. Of the fields that are celebrated for producing productive citizens, such as entrepreneurial business or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics jobs, the military is the most accessible. In a time when traditional labour jobs are disappearing, military recruiters intentionally target areas left economically distressed by the effects of globalization, offering the military as the path to a better life (Tyson 2005). At the same time, a trend Roger Stahl (2009) identifies as militainment has emerged, in which the increasingly privatized military is sold to the public as “state violence translated into an object of pleasurable consumption” (6), in contrast to the traditional propaganda, which sought to justify the military’s actions.

The embrace of the soldier as idealized citizen comes with two serious costs. The first is that by emphasizing the supposed benefits of the military, it tacitly endorses various negative elements, such as the ability to view lives as expendable or to put the “mission” ahead of its human cost. While often unspoken, this results in a culture in which certain lives are, as Judith Butler (2009) says, not “grievable.” This perfectly coincides with the logic of neoliberalism, whereby individuals are by default not valuable and must strive to justify their existence. As Olson (2012) argues, valuing lives must be minimized as “empathic motivations come to be seen as irrational, self-defeating, and existing beyond a neutral, immutable market logic” (48). The liberal discourse on the skills the military produces, coupled with the more traditional conservative celebration of military force, allows militarization to be a uniting factor in a fractured American culture.

But militarization is not only felt in foreign contexts. Simpson’s post-military role, policing, is in many ways a continuation of his time in the military. Robin D. G. Kelley (2016) outlines how the “race riots” of the late 1960s were met with military surveillance and anti-guerilla tactics by the US government. This militarization was explicitly embraced in the so-called war on drugs launched in 1971. As predominantly racialized communities began to be seen as threats, and as urban decay intensified as a result of neoliberal policies, “state capacities [shifted] away from the production of social goods and towards ‘security’ concerns produced in their absence” (Camp and Heatherton 2016, 4). The militarized police became occupiers of space rather than protectors of people. The rise of the homeland security industry in the wake of 9/11 has escalated this, evidenced both in the police’s ability to purchase great quantities of surplus military equipment and in the use of the threat of terrorism as a justification (Balko 2013). The militarization of the police has intensified police brutality against racialized communities, making the Black Lives Matter movement a necessary response to what has often been a publicly celebrated increase in militarization. Much like the military, policing has become a staple of American entertainment. Despite the human rights abuses perpetrated by police forces, pop-culture depictions of police usually mark “bad” cops through corruption rather than an embrace of excessive violence. The default position of American popular culture is to depict police as the moral champions of the modern city.

In addition to the external negatives of militarization, the celebration of soldiers also produces an internal one: trauma. As Kathleen Barry (2011) compellingly argues, not only does militarization make the lives of “enemies” ungrievable, but it also instills in men a conception that they must view themselves as expendable to the goals of state violence. She argues that if violent masculinity were natural, “society would not have to mount the powerful social pressure . . . it imposes on boys and expects from men” (13). This follows Pierre Bourdieu’s ([1998] 2001) argument that masculinity is “a trap, and it has its negative side in the permanent tension and contention, sometimes verging on the absurd, imposed on every man by the duty to assert his manliness in all circumstances” (50). Though most men do not join the military, Barry contends that, much like their treatment as idealized citizens, soldiers provide the model boys are taught to emulate in all-male environments.

Barry (2011) argues that the most common coping mechanism used to combat expendable masculinity is emotional numbness. This begins with the standard socialization of boys not to express emotions, to “be men.” But when boys join the military, this numbness is taken to an extreme. Military training seeks to dehumanize, to reshape a recruit’s sense of humanity as extending only as far as their own unit. Soldiers are expected to unquestioningly follow orders and kill without hesitation. But Barry suggests that this dehumanization process, while undoubtedly damaging, is often incomplete. While collecting accurate statistics is difficult due to the number of unreported cases, the US Department of Veterans Affairs (2023) estimates that between 11 and 20 per cent of veterans—that is, hundreds of thousands of them—experience PTSD.

American genre fiction tends to largely elide trauma produced by militarized violence and the dehumanization of soldiers. Action “heroes” are able to witness atrocities and kill dozens with seemingly little effect on their emotional states. When genre fiction does deal with trauma, it typically occurs on the personal level, often in the form of revenge for the death of women, to which further violence is depicted as the answer. Sisco King (2011) shows that American narrative structures that privilege (straight, cisgender, white) men’s trauma and vengeful sacrifice as redemptive emerge during times of social trauma, such as the post-9/11 period. She writes that despite retaliatory violence producing further trauma, it is the most common response, and that “by naturalizing masculinist constructions of the subject and privileging male bodies as both most vulnerable to trauma and most able to resolve its effects, sacrificial films reify the perceived importance of both violence and male subjects to the sustained life of the nation-state” (13). This conception suggests that the effects of trauma are best solved by their very causes, playing into the hands of militarized culture.

Jessica Jones disrupts militarization, not through a conventional “war is bad” approach, but by actually engaging with the effects of a militarized conception of masculinity. Jessica herself experiences PTSD resulting from her experiences with Kilgrave. But Kilgrave is not the only source of dehumanizing control lurking within society. The publicly celebrated military also produces great potential for destructive behaviour. Will Simpson’s narrative arc rejects the mythology of redemptive violence, of using militarized masculinity to overcome trauma. Revenge here is not a force for healing; rather, it leads Simpson down a spiral of destruction.

Even when Simpson is helpful to Jessica by acquiring security camera footage for her to track down the source of Kilgrave’s pictures, he displays the negative aspects of his militarized training. He is immediately suspicious of the hoodie-wearing Black man Malcolm Ducasse, roughing him up while accusing him of spying on them. There are also warning signs when he first seems to display emotional sensitivity, as he is distraught at the possibility that he could have killed Trish. Ominously, though he wishes to apologize to her, he believes the best way to do so is to give her an unlicensed handgun, tearfully telling her, “I just wanted you to feel safe” (ep. 1.04, “AKA 99 Friends”). Trying to convince the wary Trish to open the door to him, he tells her a story about burning his G.I. Joe action figure collection in a Barbie Dreamhouse he set alight (because he was “committed to the scenario”). He claims this is proof that “I’ve always been the guy saving people.” In fact, it foreshadows how easily excessive violence is confused for necessity, further demonstrating how young boys internalize such messages.

Simpson quickly feels constrained by his helping role. The militarized masculinity he embodies leads him to expect deference from those around him. While in his military or police roles, he would follow orders, outside of these contexts he is unable to listen to a civilian, especially a woman, as if he is surprised to learn he is not the protagonist of the story. Simpson constantly assumes he is physically more capable than the superpowered Jessica. Feeling emasculated, he eventually asks Trish to tell him the specifics of her powers. His need for control is not limited to physical issues, however, as he also assumes himself to be the most knowledgeable about how to deal with Kilgrave. Overhearing Jessica explain to Trish her plan to stop Kilgrave, Simpson immediately interjects to explain why the plan will fail. His advice is to simply shoot Kilgrave, which follows the military logic of execution as the preferable solution. Jessica opposes this as she needs Kilgrave alive to clear Hope Shlottman’s name.

Simpson is certain in his lethal approach to Kilgrave, derisively telling Jessica, “Whatever abilities you have, I’m guessing they don’t include rendition, exfiltration, and isolation of enemy combatants” (ep. 1.05, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me”). Trish is taken by this, declaring “he’s a war hero,” echoing the common injunction to “support our troops,” which assumes that soldiers are heroic regardless of their actions (Stahl 2009). The terms Simpson invokes here serve to obscure the worst human rights abuses of the “war on terror,” and are hardly reflective of heroism: “rendition” refers to the practice of turning accused terrorists over to countries where US intelligence operatives knew they would be tortured (Mayer 2005); “exfiltration” is the kidnapping of “enemies”; while “isolation of enemy combatants” involves prisoners being held in solitary confinement in places like Guantanamo Bay without ever facing charges. This mirrors what Jessica plans to do with Kilgrave, but Simpson’s choice to brag about his skills in these tactics gives us a new and murky definition of “war hero.”

Simpson’s efforts in aiding Jessica are not helpful; rather, they reveal the normalized brutality of his training. The plan to capture Kilgrave by drugging him with a dart fails due to the intervention of Kilgrave’s hired private security contractors. In response, Simpson threatens to torture an injured contractor left behind in an effort to find out Kilgrave’s location. Jessica prevents this by simply talking with the contractor, whom Kilgrave has told nothing. Yet Simpson is convinced he is holding back, which reveals one of torture’s many problems: if the torturer believes there is a truth to find, they will not cease their violence until they hear what they want. Ironically, Jessica has to him of the motto of the police—“serve and protect”—in the process pointing out just how far Simpson’s militarized behaviour is from the putative ideals of policing.

However, Simpson remains convinced that his approach exhibits a sense of “realism.” He tells Jessica, “everyone wants to be the hero, but now I see we can’t be, because there’s us and there’s them. . . . It just means we can’t always help. Not without getting hurt” (ep. 1.08, “AKA WWJD?”). He also tells Trish that “some people deserve to be removed from this earth” (ep. 1.07, “AKA Top Shelf Perverts”). This version of realism has infected the superhero genre since the 1980s with revisionist comics like Frank Miller’s Daredevil (1979–83) and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986–7), but it has intensified in the superhero’s transition to film and television. As Will Brooker (2012) points out in a discussion of the proclamation of realism in superhero films, “realism” tends to mean an angry, violent masculinity and an emphasis on technology. Through this adaptation, the superhero genre moved away from imagining alternative forms of justice and instead entrenched certain patterns of state violence as inevitable. To make superheroes into a mass market property for adult audiences, superhero violence has evolved from the fantasy of excessive but non-lethal violence to superheroes who kill, as is the norm in the action-adventure blockbuster. Jessica Jones, a show clearly marketed for adults, represents a middle ground. The show treats killing as a drastic option. In keeping with this critical stance, Simpson’s conception of realism does not lead him to be a celebrated anti-hero, but rather begins to clarify his position as an antagonist. This becomes the breaking point for Jessica, and their paths in seeking “justice” diverge from this point.

Simpson’s first solution on his own is to bomb Kilgrave’s house (ep. 1.08, “AKA WWJD?”). This is not dissimilar to American drone strikes, which are presented as targeted killings, but which are, in reality, indiscriminate (Ackerman 2014). Simpson’s plan would have killed not only Kilgrave, but also several mind-controlled innocents as “collateral” death. The only person he considers rescuing is Jessica, who is in the house with her own plans to neutralize Kilgrave. Still needing him alive, she instead alerts Kilgrave to the bomb’s existence. With the bombing thwarted, Simpson turns to another of the military’s preferred methods of assassination, infiltration. That night he and two ex-army friends return to the house to murder Kilgrave. Instead, they find that he has been drugged by Jessica, who flies away with him before they have a chance to shoot. However, Kilgrave had a backup plan, using mind control to force his elderly neighbour to return the bomb to Simpson. This kills Simpson’s two friends and leaves him gravely injured. His vengeance literally backfires on him, providing not healing, but setting him up for the most traumatic circumstances yet and killing his own team and an innocent woman.

Rushed to the hospital by Trish, Simpson demands to be taken to one Dr. Kozlov, whom the hospital staff do not know. Kozlov mysteriously arrives and Simpson, feeling emasculated by both his injuries and his inability to defeat Kilgrave, says, “I want back in.” Kozlov vaguely refers to needing to alter protocol after “what happened in Damascus,” grounding this operation in the ongoing American conflicts in the Middle East, but he is willing to take Simpson back into his program. He offers Simpson red (aggression), white (stabilizer), and blue (downer) pills. Simpson ignores orders and takes two red pills (ep. 1.09, “AKA Sin Bin”). Simpson’s addiction to militarized masculinity is literalized in drugs coloured after the American flag. His trauma re-ignited by mind control and intensified by his injuries, he must return to what he imagined gave his life purpose.

The drugs reveal that Will Simpson is an adaptation of the Marvel Comics character Frank Simpson, code-named Nuke, a man driven insane by a failed experiment in the Weapons Plus program, the same one that had produced Captain America (see Miller 1986 for Nuke’s introduction, and Morrison 2003 for his background in the Weapons Plus program). With his military buzzcut and the American flag tattooed on his face, the Simpson of 1986’s Daredevil is a parody of Reagan-era American militarism and the belief that the military “wasn’t given permission to win” in Vietnam (Reagan 1981). The renamed Will Simpson reimagines parody as tragedy. Up until this point, it has been emphasized that Simpson’s trauma was produced by Kilgrave, and that his military training would provide the cure for this trauma, following the cliché that vengeance is curative. However, Kilgrave only re-ignited Simpson’s deeper trauma, for the comment “what happened in Damascus” offers a hint that losing control to Kilgrave was not the first time Simpson has lost control. Simpson is one of many veterans suffering from unresolved trauma. But the military does not provide veterans with the tools for dealing with trauma (Barry 2011). Rather, they are expected to rely upon the self-reliance they were taught in the military. Unlike the fantasy that the military teaches veterans the skills to be successful in their post-military lives, having to be resilient and lacking support only deepens their trauma. Simpson left the military, but for a militarized job in policing. That drugs are used to cope with the trauma represents an apt symbol. Up to 13 per cent of veterans have a substance-abuse problem, primarily alcohol, and, as seen here in a hyperbolic form, prescription drug dependencies (Murphy 2023). But it also shows that militarized masculinity is an addiction, giving the short-term rush of power with the long-term effects of paranoia and emptiness.

High on his red pills (ep. 1.10, “AKA 1,000 Cuts”), Simpson arrives at the facility he had set up with Jessica to hold Kilgrave, only to find him already escaped. He is confronted by another police officer who has been reluctantly helping Jessica, Detective Oscar Clemons. Clemons relaxes when Simpson shows him his badge. Clemons reassures him they have all the evidence they need to put Kilgrave away. But that only re-inspires Simpson’s belief that this will not work. He says, “maybe the system will be unable to contain him.” It is here that Simpson identifies Kilgrave “as a terrorist, not a purse snatcher” (ep. 1.10, “AKA 1,000 Cuts”). As Lewis (2012) emphasizes, “terrorism is the word that makes any situation instantly dire” (232). Terrorism becomes a vague accusation that moves the individual beyond the criminal into the monstrous. Similarly, the United States has used the term “unlawful combatant” as justification to ignore both constitutional safeguards and international human rights laws. Indeed, virtually any method has been justified in the “war on terror” (Konigsberg 2009). Reflecting his militarized training, Simpson sees terrorism as justifying any means of taking down Kilgrave. But militarization’s black-and-white world view treats any questioning of authority as an allying with the enemy. In Simpson’s warped view, Clemons, who simply believes in due process, is a barrier, and so, after getting the story from Clemons, including the location of Trish, Simpson shoots him in the head and torches the room. When Simpson arrives at the hotel, Trish notices his pupils are dilated and finds it unusual that he recovered quickly.

Simpson is suspicious of Dr. Albert Thompson, Kilgrave’s father, who is working on a vaccine based on Jessica’s DNA that will guard against Kilgrave’s powers. Losing control, he assaults Dr. Thompson, thereby putting the vaccine at jeopardy. His violence once again compromises the possibility of systemic solutions. He calms down, but Trish is horrified and demands he leave, snatching away his pills. He tries to tell Trish the effects the drugs have on him: “everything turns red. It’s good for battle, bad for people you care about” (ep. 1.11, “AKA I’ve Got the Blues”). While this is true, Simpson cannot even conceptualize a caring relationship outside of his control. Ultimately, his apparent honesty is but a ploy to manipulate Trish into telling him how to get at Jessica, who has become not just a competitor in bringing down Kilgrave, but an obstacle.

The addiction to vengeance at this point has rendered Simpson a villain. He barges into Jessica’s apartment, resulting in a brutal fight with Jessica. She demands he “tell [her] you’re Kilgraved,” but the answer is far more horrifying—that traumatized militarized masculinity is similar in its effects to being Kilgraved; namely, the inability to deal with situations calmly, or with anything other than brute, mindless violence. Simpson is out of control, firing his gun wildly and throwing Jessica through a wall. Simpson tries to slash open the door to the bathroom, where Jessica and Trish have taken refuge, the scene shot in apparent homage to the image of Jack Nicholson chopping down a door in The Shining (1980), that classic tale of fragile masculinity as a route to madness. Eventually subdued, Kozlov repossesses Simpson, returning him to the military not as a person, but as a weapon. In his quest for justice, violence did not cure Simpson’s trauma.

What makes Simpson a rare character is his role as an antagonist police officer who is neither corrupt nor fundamentally a bad person. Criticism of law enforcement is often presented through the popular notion that the frequent violence enacted by the police is the result of “bad apples” rather than structural issues associated with the rise of so-called broken windows–style policing, which seeks to control marginalized populations through harsh punishments for minor crimes (Camp and Heatherton 2016). Jessica Jones does not engage in this level of critique, nor does she emphasize that the violence of militarized policing is primarily aimed against racialized communities. But neither does the show engage in what Roland Barthes ([1957] 2012) called “the inoculation,” where a small part of a system is criticized only to reaffirm that the good resulting from that system is worth its defects. The police, after the reluctant ally Clemons is murdered by Simpson, play no role in aiding Jessica. Instead, the show offers a middle ground, looking at how the militarized system of policing would produce “bad apple” cops through trauma. Simpson’s trauma demonstrates how a militarized police force will continue to produce “bad apples” by encouraging certain forms of masculine dominance and violence to the point that these compromised individuals eventually lose control. Instead, Simpson believes he is doing good as he is following the route he has been taught. It is what militarization teaches that is the source of the problem.

This oppositional stance to militarization is refreshing in the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which initially used the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division (S.H.I.E.L.D) to tie together first the film franchise and then link it with their television properties, beginning with ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2013–present). The military was the glue holding together the universe’s heroes, recruiting and moulding them into a functioning team. The masculinity modelled by the actual military is barely present in Marvel Cinematic Universe, where S.H.I.E.L.D. presents something of a liberal fantasy of the military, using force only when necessary and with a minimum of collateral damage. In fact, Simpson’s two traits are present within The Avengers (2012), as Captain America is the product of military medicine and the Hulk’s rage is harnessed, with its uncontrollability played as much for comedic effect as Simpson’s is for horror. Jessica Jones instead shows militarized masculinity veering more closely to reality, a force both inwardly and outwardly destructive.

However, Jessica Jones ultimately privileges violence, defending it as a solution, though performed by Jessica rather than the military or police. As a last resort, she kills Kilgrave by snapping his neck. This seems to condone Simpson’s solution, though Jessica is much more reluctant to enact such violence. The plot is constructed so that it could be argued that Simpson’s desire to shoot Kilgrave, when they instead darted him, would have saved many people’s lives. However, it will be up to future seasons to determine if Kilgrave’s death is curative of Jessica’s trauma, or if it will be another thing that haunts her.

Regardless, Jessica Jones demonstrates that militarized masculinity does not cure trauma. None of Simpson’s actions have brought him peace—indeed, his efforts to face his trauma have seen him spiral out of control. His actions result in the deaths of innocent people, the destruction of his relationship, a crippling drug addiction, loss of personal freedom, and ultimately forestalls justice. This is not the fantasy world where trauma is overcome by “redemptive violence” (Sisco King, 2012). Rather, the show demonstrates that when society not only refuses to treat trauma, but valorizes the circumstances that produce it, justice is unattainable. Like the best superhero stories, Jessica Jones uses the hyperbole inherent to the genre to depict a very real crisis, showing that militarization produces not heroes but only further violence and trauma.

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