Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars

by Rob Thomas

  This was dire, horrifying, infuriating-and Buffy knew it. Though she was told she was the "chosen one," she heard the truth: Slaying was a command, not a calling. She had to do her time until she was used up, and then they'd summon her replacement.

  Here's where we get to the "Buffy rocks!" part of the story: She refused to obey. Sure, she did train, and spent nights patrolling for fresh vamps, and plotted against one Big Bad after another. But she made the job her own. Tell no one? As if. Give up her social life? Not with out a knock-down-drag-out. Avoid romance? Unlikely, what with broody, dreamy Angel lurking just outside her window

  When I saw Buffy, stake in hand, bantering with a vampire atop a tombstone, it was not so much my understanding of the image-I knew the toy surprise would be watching the pint-sized blonde kick Fangboy's ass-that excited me. It was the banter. Every quip was a reminder that Buffy was playing through the pain, fighting to keep feeling, keep living, keep making her own choices. The flying kicks and quarter-to battles were fun, but it was Buffy's resolve, not the Slayer's might, that vaulted her into the girl-power firmament.

  The Third Wave: Enter Ilteronica

  Signature series: Veronica Mars

  Signature character: Veronica Mars

  What makes her special? She takes a licking but keeps on ticking.

  Emblematic struggles: Solving the mysteries of her best friend's murder and her mother's disappearance. Taking Dad's side against an angry town, even though it made her a social pariah.

  Key physical transformation: She was raped while unconscious at a high school party.

  Behind-the-scenes quote: "I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting if somebody had gotten so far down that she just didn't give a fuck anymore, that [high school] pressure didn't mean much to her?"

  -Creator Rob Thomas (Havrilesky)

  Inciting incident: Dead friend, missing mom, unsolved rape, a new school year-take your pick.

  I believe Rob Thomas when he says, in interview after interview, that he did not model Veronica after Buffy and had only seen a handful of Sunnydale episodes at the time he created his teen noir. Yet I still can't resist connecting dot after dot. There are just too many parallels between these deceptively packaged, pint-sized blondes, too many echoes and riffs-and, frankly, too much cross-casting-to ignore. Buffy walked dark streets hunting for vamps; Veronica stakes out the seedy Camelot motel. Buffy's dad left the family; Lianne Mars abandoned Veronica and stole her college money. Buffy learned monster history from Giles, her watcher and fatherly stand-in; Veronica gets her sleuthing shortcuts from Dad Keith, a sheriff turned private investigator. I could go on, but, heck, you probably have your own annotated list.

  On first glance, the series's big pictures match as well as the details. Both Whedon and Thomas introduced their heroines with happy, innocent befores (when both girls wore their hair long and straight, like children) and dark, lonely aftermaths. And I mean dark: One leaned gothic, one leans noir, but both scribes pile on the hurts to make their outsiders that much more sympathetic-and to make the rare moments of happiness and recognition that much grander. Think of Buffy's tearjerker prom scene, when Jonathan surprised her with the Class Protector award; all the toil, all the life-saving... her classmates had noticed, after all. (Even Giles was impressed.) In a kind of call-and-response move-I don't care what Thomas says, this had to be a shout-out to the Slayer-classmates gave Veronica some love as she accepted her diploma at the end of season two. It was no ninety-second standing ovation, mind you, but there were distinct cheers for the girl who'd introduced herself to viewers as the pariah of Neptune High. And the scene was made more interesting because we can't be sure why people applauded for Veronica. They could have been satisfied clients of our teen PI. or just classmates made generous by the pomp, circumstance, and freedom of leaving high school behind. On Veronica Mars, even the happy surprises produce more questions than answers, and the world never stops to devote its attention-whether evil or benign-on one teen girl.

  At this point the Buffy parallel breaks down, because, season-long mysteries notwithstanding, there's no Big Bad (er, except the writers) orchestrating our heroine's every battle from behind the scenes. Rather, Veronica's rape was revealed as a cosmic joke brought on by circumstance and foolish pride: Veronica crashed that party in defiance of the 09er crowd, Madison didn't know the drink she handed Veronica was laced with anything more than spit, and Beaver assaulted her in an attempt to conquer his mixed-up psyche. She wasn't chosen or targeted; she was unlucky. She was spot-on, then, in likening tragedy to "a tornado, uprooting everything, creating chaos" ("Meet John Smith," 1-3). Life is messy, unfathomable-but most of all impersonal. As Veronica is not special, her misfortunes make her the Anygirl to My So-Called Life's Everygirl: Things that could have happened to anyone just happen to happen to her.

  The Veronica we meet is a survivor, a kind of second draft cobbled together in the aftermath of losing Lilly, her mom, and control over her own body. But she's also a rebuilt Angela Chase. In the show's hazy, overexposed flashbacks, we saw that Angela and Veronica began their high school years on similar terms: both had two parents at home and spent their days chasing after a wild, exciting best friend. Of course we're meant to feel for Veronica during these glimpses of what used to be and what might have been, but for me the melancholy stretches beyond the realm of Neptune. Veronica's trajectory mimics that of teen girl dramas as a whole, with the average girl now reduced to fleshing out backstory and prologue, little more than a ghostly reminder of happiness past.

  Thomas wants it that way. He has said that what he likes about Veronica is that she's beyond the typical teen girl insecurities about having the right look and the right friends, that she's been knocked so low that high school pressure no longer means anything to her (Havrilesky). His protagonist is "over" the high school story, and his series is, too. And so, despite its many echoes of Angela and Buffy, Veronica Mars is no hybrid of its predecessors. In this new, third wave of teen girl drama, the heroine ventures into the wider world ... and risks getting lost in the process.

  Veronica's misfortunes have taught her that everyone is dangerous, and anyone can hurt you-if you let them. So she vows she won't be fooled again. Her investigative work for Dad is a kind of training, a steady inoculation against weakening her resolve. Waiting to snap proof of a spouse's affair, she vowed she'd never marry because, "sooner or later, the people you love let you down" ("Pilot," 1-1). While her sleuthing presents opportunities for insight into our heroine, it also limits our access to her. Veronica Mars is a detective series, after all, which means large chunks of episodes are devoted to suspicious characters, wild-goose chases, red herrings, and the genre's other tropes. This heavy emphasis on the seedy underbelly sometimes feels uncomfortably like assimilation into TV's crime-obsessed mainstream. With its complicated, run-time-sapping murder mysteries and hard-boiled, hard-to-know heroine, the show wouldn't need much tweaking to pass for CSI: Neptune. Post-Angela, girl-centric, high school-set series have always relied on a hook, but Thomas appears to have unwittingly reversed the phenomenon. The show has morphed into a detective story, first and foremost; this time the teen protagonist is just the hook.

  Scratch that: The teen girl is the hook. Here's Thomas recounting the origin of his series:

  This idea that I was attracted to, and had been thinking about since I taught high school, was this vague notion about teenagers being desensitized and jaded and sexualized so much earlier than I feel like even my generation fifteen, twenty years before had been. That seemed like a perfect thing to try to shine a spotlight on. [That concept] was interesting to me when the protagonist was a boy, but when I started thinking in terms of a girl who had seen too much and experienced too much at too young of an age, it became even more potent to me. It just seemed that much edgier and more difficult to swallow, in a good way. (Havrilesky)

  This is outside-in storytelling: What kind of protagonist will make the genre more interesting, and with what can she be sad
dled (rape! a dead best friend!) to make it edgier still? The answer, of course, was a scarred Angela, an un-super Buffy, driven to solve a familiar kind of murder mystery. Though I, too, held my breath waiting to learn who killed Lilly Kane, the very question dug up old hurts from 1995, when ABC replaced My So-Called Life the following season with Murder One, a legal noir revolving around the murder of a teen girl. ("I guess ABC is more comfortable with a dead girl than a live one," Holzman remarked at the time [Chambers].) With Lilly and Veronica, teen girl drama both doubles back to that time and tiptoes forwardhere's another dead girl, yes, but Thomas also presents a whipsmart live one, and she's the one who cracks the case.

  The more I reflect on this evolution from so-called experiment to teen girl as hook, the more Angela, Buffy, and Veronica appear sisters in a decade-spanning trilogy: follow along as television ignores, then indulges, and finally co-opts the female adolescent experience! My So-Called Life and Buffy indulged and awoke our inner teens by putting the feelings of adolescence front and center. They taught us the teen girl story, the recurring beats, milestones, and conflicts, and we bring that understanding and its related assumptions to our experience of Veronica. We fill in the blanks as we want to, seeing Buffy parallels, sensing Angela's ghost just outside the room. Meanwhile, the story moves on, dancing from one Neptune intrigue to the next. In shifting much of its attention away from Veronica in favor of typi cal TV mysteries of the week and season, the third wave and its Anygirl offer the final lesson of adolescence: Out in the big, bad, messy world, nothing is ever all about you.

  SAMANTHA BORNEMANN has written about film and television for Playboy.com, PopMatters, and ShinyGun. com, the magazine she founded with fellow Northwestern grads in 2000. She lives in Chicago and is at work on a novel about Everygirls (and boys) grown up.

  REUXEI ES

  Chambers, Bill. "Film Freak Central DVD Review: My So-Called Life (Volume One)." Film Freak Central. Aug. 2000. .

  Gross, Edward, ed. "Buffy Meets the Press." Vampires & Slayers. .

  Havrilesky, Heather. "The Man Behind Veronica." Salon. 29 Mar. 2005. .

  Mendoza, Manuel. "Teen Drama Still Has Impact 10 Years After Cancellation." The Dallas Morning News, 26 Mar. 2004.

  "Pilot." My So-Called Life. Episode 1, Dir. Scott Winant. ABC, 25 Aug. 1994.

  1 had cm "big" idea when I wrote the Veronica Mars pilot.

  Executives always tend to ask you the question, "What's it really about?"

  Well, it's about a seventeen year-old girl who happens to be a detective....

  "No, what's it about?"

  Oh, that. The zeitgest, etc.? It's about this prematurely jaded generation of teenagers who are exposed to too much too soon. They can access anything. They're sexualized too early.

  Veronica will be the poster child for loss of innocence.

  I went to high school in the early eighties, taught high school in the early nineties and wrote about high school in the early 2000s. Even in the span of those twenty years, the changing expectations of what a typical teenager has experienced, witnessed, googled, understands are radically different. (For a better-certainly scarier-example, see the movie Thirteen.)

  From Golden Girl

  to Rich Dude Kryptonite

  Why Veronica Mars Is in with the Out-Crowd

  E USED TO be friends," the Veronica Mars theme song by the Dandy Warhols reminds us at the beginning of each episode. Sassy "bad-ass" Veronica was once one of Neptune High School's in-crowd, a friend of the powerful elite. She was also innocent and naive. However, when we first met Veronica in her hometown of Neptune, California, all of that was in the past. Her best friend had been murdered, her mother had abandoned her, she'd lost her virginity under circumstances she couldn't remember, and she was no longer one of the favored. The seventeen-year-old social pariah was a far cry from what she'd been only a year before, when she was a member of the pep squad (for PE. credit, not to attract boys) and welcome at the best lunch table at school. She was jaded. Her hair was shorter, her clothes edgy, and her attitude-well, authority? What's that?

  But Veronica was far more than a girl whose world had been shattered. She'd been fast-tracked to a maturity she might never have experienced if Lilly Kane hadn't been murdered. To understand her transformation, we need to look at what she would have been like if Lilly were still alive. Would she still be one of the incrowd? And why does she continue to long for the life she believes she's lost?

  The writers gave us Veronica's own answer to the first question in the dream sequence in the last episode of season two, "Not Pictured" (2-22). Here we saw Veronica's vision of her ideal life: her loving, intact family preparing for her high school graduation. Her mother is cooking a pancake breakfast and her father is wearing his sheriff's uniform. Veronica is dressed in a sweet floral sundress, something the new Veronica would never wear. (For her real graduation Veronica donned a black halter dress.)

  At school searching for her cap and gown, Duncan and Logan pull her leg about Wallace, whom she's never met, and she believes them, something that would never happen with the cynical new Veronica. Logan responds, "...you have to be the most gullible girl I've ever met." And when she meets up with Wallace, she tells him, "High school was a blast." He replies, "Oh, you're one of those."

  Obviously Veronica was dreaming, both literally and figuratively. Wishing she were still so "gullible" is a symptom of how truly horrific she's discovered life can be. Neptune High is a minefield of amoral students and faculty to be negotiated carefully. Lilly was about to open Veronica's eyes before her death. Lilly had a secret to share. Promiscuous Lilly, who hid naked photos of a guy she met in Italy in the vent in her room, was sleeping with her boyfriend's father. It would have been interesting to see how Veronica would have reacted to this information. The fact that she never got to has frozen Veronica's image of her ideal life in a time warp, leaving her to yearn for the time before she knew the truth, for a vision of life that effectively never existed. In true childish fashion, not knowing meant it wasn't so. Not knowing was living in an illusion, which is exactly where Veronica wishes she could return.

  Sixteen-year-old Veronica questioned very little. She was a true innocent. She was trusting, she was part of what she thought was a loving family, and she believed in the good of humanity. She wore her hair in long, soft curls, chose modest, age-appropriate clothing, and wore lots of pastels. In a flashback where Lilly was going through her closet before the homecoming dance, Lilly exclaimed, "None of this reflects your personality." She pulled out a dress and declared, "You're not a yellow cotton dress." Veronica asked, "What am I?" And Lilly replied, "You're strapless red satin" ("The Wrath of Con," 1-4).

  This is an interesting exchange between these two characters, because sixteen-year-old Veronica was a yellow cotton dress. Indeed, these two best friends didn't even seem to know one another. And perhaps here is a flaw in the set-up of an otherwise very well thoughtout and skillfully executed plot. Lilly and Veronica were so different it's hard to believe they could have been best friends.

  Since our glimpses into their friendship are restricted to Veronica's memory and dream sequences, the viewer can only speculate that, as different as they were, Veronica and Lilly connected on some gut level, as friends often do. They simply liked each other, despite their disparities. Lilly had a certain charm about her, a zest for life we saw demonstrated in the clips Logan put together for the dedication of her memorial fountain at Neptune High. In the film of their homecoming date, she stood in the limo with her head and shoulders through the sunroof, wind blowing through her hair, and declared, "You love me, don't you," as she smiled into the camera ("The Wrath of Con"). We're convinced that Veronica and Logan do love her. And we, as viewers, can't help but love Lilly a little, too. It's this Lilly that Veronica misses so desperately, the exciting, fun
-loving, go-for-broke gal who was always pushing the envelope. What Veronica failed to see was Lilly's dark side and the consequences of her actions.

  While Veronica and Lilly may have been opposites, Duncan and Veronica were perfectly suited to one another at that point. Both were sweet, sensitive, and moral (note Duncan's throwaway inclusion of an outsider at the lunch table in one of the flashbacks).

  We learn that both were virgins in the homecoming memory sequence. Veronica was exactly what she wore: a modest, light-pink formal intended for a dance she had no idea she wouldn't attend. Contrast Veronica's dress to Lilly's, a seductive, glittery metallic gown with a neckline that plunged almost to her waist, a dress far more appropriate for a woman in her thirties.

  Veronica's memories of that night are glorified. What the viewer sees when Lilly, Logan, Duncan, and Veronica party in the limo and never make it to the dance is not what most would consider the perfect date. "I've already lived the dream," she thought when Troy invited her to homecoming. "Everything else seems like a cheap reminder" ("The Wrath of Con"). Which may lead the viewer to question: Was Veronica on the same date as the one depicted in the episode? She remembers the events but sees no harm in Lilly kissing her on the lips or the potential danger in the worlds Lilly might introduce her to. For Veronica, it all seemed innocent. The only danger she perceived was her father's anger when she got home after being out all night. The world Lilly lived in and the dangers it posed simply didn't exist for Veronica.

  But it did for Duncan. He knew Lilly and what she was capable of well. Towards the end of the first season, Veronica knew much more about her, too. When Duncan was suspected of killing Lilly, she defended him to herself by thinking, "Duncan and Lilly were so different. They didn't always like each other, but they always loved each other" ("Kanes and Abel's," 1-17). She could have been talking about herself, for Veronica continues to love Lilly unquestioningly. Whether or not she continues to like her is never addressed.