"Veronica Mars" and the Fear of Being Vulnerable

**Spoilers for the First Season of Veronica Mars**  

(NOTE: I have not seen beyond the first season, and I'm interested to see how much of my assessment holds up going forward)

Veronica Mars, like most great shows, is about a lot of different things. It’s about race, class, and the way socio-economic status creates divisions within a town. It’s about family ties and the way we are defined by and reject the influence of our parents. It’s about the way people act out expected gender roles and masculinity and femininity. It’s about the hierarchies of social orders and the fluidity and instability of those divisions.  

Most obviously, it’s a show about the intricate murder mystery of a young female, Lily Kane (Amanda Seyfried), a popular girl who had a knack for causing and getting into trouble. Lily is a femme fatale, but her ability for the fatalism of that title is one of many subversions Veronica Mars brings to the film noir genre. 

But if I had to say what Veronica Mars is about at its core, it’s really a show about vulnerability. Moreover, it’s a series about the fear of being vulnerable. It’s about people posturing and pretending to be so much more than they are. Film noir is a genre with deeply damaged people trying to act like they’re above the shattered world around them. It features archetypes who are haunted by dark, complicated pasts they wish they could outrun. Veronica Mars plays to those archetypes, but it ultimately creates an emotional realism to them that transcends their genre origins. These are fragile, flesh-and-blood people who break on more than the philosophical, abstract level noirs can seem to exist in. (It ties that emotional wellspring to the volatile, complicated emotional lives of teenagers and high school as the incubator for those feelings)

At the center of the show is the titular character. Veronica (the excellent, perfectly casted Kristen Bell) begins the series dealing with the fallout of her father’s investigation into the murder of her best friend Lily. His insistence on pursuing Jake Kane, a software mogul who caused Neptune to reach an economic boom. This creates a rift between the Mars and much of the rest of the town. Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni) loses his position as sheriff, and when Veronica sides with her father, she finds herself ostracized and ousted from the popular crowd. If this weren’t enough, in the aftermath, Veronica’s mother flees town. Another story dovetails with the murder investigation throughout the season; Veronica was drugged and raped at a party shortly after the murder. 

All of this has understandably hardened Veronica. Her choices in outfits are markedly different from her time with the cool kids, less girly and more reserved, for starters. But her whole personality has shifted as well. She’s steelier and more cynical. She hides behind sharp, sarcastic quips. Veronica is burying her feelings through conscious decisions. Veronica has become scared to experience what she’s feeling. She’s not sure she could handle it.

Stylized as the visuals of the show can get, in that moody, shadowy noir manner, they mask deeper emotions behind their surfaces. They also hint at a sense of darkness hiding behind the sunny California surfaces. Appearances matter in the world of the show. They mark status, privilege and wealth. Veronica Mars is a highly class conscious show. Veronica’s friend Eli "Weevil" Navarro (Francis Capra) is a Latino who comes from a working class background. His race and lower class standing garner him a lowered reputation -- while the community’s in-crowd is run by rich white kids. Weevil is forced to continually put up a front in order to survive the heated environment (yet, of course, he’s a nice guy at heart). 

But everyone is acting out a certain version of themselves to the outside world. This becomes most apparent in Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring, exceptionally magnetic in the role). Initial appearances would peg Logan as a supposed bad boy. But his outwardly faux-douchieness is a form of play-acting. Logan’s family life is troubled. His father is not only a serial adulterer but regularly beats his own son. Logan is also burying his emotions. 

Logan begins opening up in the wake of his mother committing suicide. Logan is desperate to believe that his mother’s death was staged, and he hires out Veronica to discover the truth. When her death turns out to be true, Logan, in a rare display of emotion, breaks down in front of Veronica. This is all the more peculiar for the displays of antagonism and distrust Logan has demonstrated towards Veronica up until this point. 

This proves to only be the start of Logan’s transformation. He soon shows unexpected shades to his personality, revealing a sensitive and noble side to Veronica. Late in the season, Veronica and Logan share a passionate kiss in the heat of the moment. It leads to deeper intimacy and eventually a relationship. Neither quite knows what they’ve gotten themselves into. They’ve stumbled into a relationship they describe as “illogical”, shared as it is with a supposed rival. 

Notice the way Dohring changes his voice, softer, lower, more cautious, in portraying Logan when he’s around Veronica. It’s the genuine article. It’s the voice one uses when they completely trust someone. In Veronica’s world, trust is hard to come by. As a budding gumshoe, she takes on cases where it is never entirely transparent as to who is responsible and who is trustworthy. The one defining element to their relationship going into the end game is how much Veronica can really trust Logan. She considers whether she is being used by him. Veronica is scared of letting people in. People have let her down too much – from her classmates and former friends to her flaky mother. Beyond this, her brittle demeanor comes from her experience of being raped. The show doesn’t extensively dwell on the incident, but it is clear that she has avoided romantic relationships (and relationships more broadly), in part, for this reason. 

Interestingly enough, the couple’s past relationships – Logan’s with Lily and Veronica’s with Lily’s brother Duncan (Teddy Dunn) – in hindsight, seem like their own form of playacting. As revealed in flashbacks, these relationships come off as stereotypical romances, clichés not of high school romances but something closer to a cheap teen comedy. They were rich, privileged kids doing what rich, privileged kids believe they are supposed to do, rather than what is necessarily most fulfilling. The charade of these relationships clarifies in the corrosive nature to Lily and Logan’s coupling. The two frequently were breaking up, and Lily was known to have a number of other boys on the side (in another bit of subversion, Logan is the faithful one). Logan and Veronica’s relationship which outwardly makes no supposed logical sense, is actually a healthier and better relationship for both than the seemingly sounder fairytale romances they previously held.

The Veronica-Logan relationship, at once, comes out of the blue. And yet, it feels like it was inevitable. There is an emotional validness to it that eclipses the messiness to the way the plot arrives at it. Its organicness derives from taking advantage of television’s long-term storytelling strengths. Slowly Veronica’s chipper demeanor and impeccable sleuthing peel away to reveal someone uncommonly damaged and who is sometimes not always right in her convictions. Logan initially comes off like an asshole, but by the end, he’s more akin to a lite anti-hero status. He’s a good person whose fundamental moral footing has gotten out of step. 

The last stretch of Veronica Mars’ first season dedicates a significant amount of time to their relationship. It’s easily the most charged portions of the season. It feels exciting because the show has been playing a long game, hinting at not only answers to its mysteries but deeper emotions as well. The show becomes ever more baroque as it heads towards its finale, and it begins relying more on a character-based, emotional emphasis over the more plot focused concerns of the earlier goings. Much of this stems from the writers’ carefully constructed plot which starts delivering payoffs with a wonderful precision in the homestretch. As the show starts revealing its hand, the emotional material takes front and center more and harmonizes with the plot mechanics ever more elegantly and satisfyingly. As the emotional underpinning become text rather than subtext, Veronica and her peers are allowed to expose more of their inner selves, disregarding social mores and betraying their own human frailty. 

Veronica Mars’ central narrative comes out of the death of a damaged person. Lily was never good enough in the eyes of her parents. She harbored a sadness that led to a self-destructive streak, and ultimately to her death. Her death opens up a crack in the carefully crafted facades of the Neptune community. In the process, of solving the murder case, Veronica allows herself to come to terms with the events that took place and to accept her complicated emotions towards what occurred. In other words, she allows herself to finally be vulnerable.