The first thing you notice is how young she looks, how innocent. Kristen Bell is a beautiful woman and a superb actress, but I have to think the first thing Rob Thomas noticed in her is that she doesn't look capable of holding a taser, much less firing one. The men in the series are all more mature, tall and lean and surrounding her like wolves. They look at her and see prey, while we look and wonder if they're right. At the end, having watched sixty-four episodes and a movie, I'm still not sure.
I'm talking, of course, about Veronica Mars, the late and much lamented television show that ran for three seasons and the aforementioned, kickstartered movie. An old friend, someone whose tastes in these things run to mine, spent a solid ten minutes raving about the show into his beer while I pretended to listen. I should mention that this friend is six-foot three, a former college football star, and about as much of a prototypical dude as can be found walking this earth. How he became a marshmallow, I'm still not sure. Suppose you could call me one now as well. That's cool though. There are worse things. Now about the show….
I'm not one of those people who look down on CW television programming, of which Veronica Mars is absolutely a predecessor. That channel, for anyone who's paying attention, is on a giant hot streak (Arrow is one of the best things on TV). The shows do, however, have a certain pattern. Hot girls in thongs, attractively brooding boys with tragedy in their pasts, redemption arcs, soap, etc etc. VMars has every one of these qualities. But, it's all tempered by undercurrents of rage and anguish that run through Neptune like sewage. There's a lovely, wicked sense of humor in much of the dialogue, and the show is never afraid of melodrama, but when it goes dark, everything gets pitch-black in an awful hurry. Scenes of surfer frat-boys chasing girls are interspersed with investigations into rape, murder, possible incest, pedophilia and much more. As fun, funny, and wonderfully touching as this show is, what I find most admirable about it is that willingness to follow every story to a logical (internally logical, anyways) conclusion, no matter how horrifying it might be.
Consider a moment, late in the last episode the show would ever air. Logan Echolls, the bad-boy suitor played by Jason Dohring, has just seen a sex-tape involving the ex he still loves and her consummately useless new boyfriend. He's horrified, not by the sex but by the violation of her privacy. We can see him remembering the moment, two seasons prior, when Veronica told him she'd been raped. He snaps. Fists thud, blood drips, glass shatters, and so forth. That Logan targets the wrong person is regrettable but not nessecarily relevant. His anger is protective, not jealous. Soapy? Sure, but the scene is all about misunderstood motivations. Logan doesn't get Piz, and Veronica, sadly, doesn't get Logan. She thinks he's still the same lonely, furious, tortured little psycho. There's some of that, but the boy is becoming a man and she's too blind to see it. Logan isn't trying to possess her anymore. He knows it won't work. So, he fights to make her safe, knowing exactly what it will mean for their future. He's also wrong, but we don't get to find out about that for nine years.
It's a rare thing to find a work of noir produced in the past few decades that actually gets what noir is about. Rian Johnson managed it with Brick, but Rob Thomas did it first and better here. At the heart of the genre is a conviction that no, everything might not be ok. Modern fiction is rubberized. Bad things happen, but then there's a bounce and everything is back to normal, or better. Rob Thomas understands causality and consequences. Veronica is torn apart by the pain of losing Lilly, shredded by her rape, ground to dust by the ostracism of her father. All this before the series even begins. She's damaged, and too blind or too arrogant to see it. I'm fascinated by the way the series (and movie even more so) makes it clear the this life is terrible for Veronica. It endangers her life plenty of times, shatters relationships, and generally comes fairly close to costing her sanity. Maybe worst of all, it's stunting. Logan is a very different, and far better person at the end of S3. How much has our heroine changed?
I'd be remiss, in describing these character arcs, if I didn't touch on the acting. Some quick hits: Enrico Colantoni is the best thing about the show, and I'd happily watch him and Bell bounce off each other for fifty more movies. Francis Capra is unpolished, but plays sly and funny so brilliantly that I don't really care. Messr's Hansen, Dunn, and Daggs are all very acceptable and sometime truly great (Hansen in particular. Yes, really.). Harry Hamlin, that brilliant actors actor, is just simply fun to watch. One of my biggest quibbles with the show is that Aaron Echolls is probably the worst-written of all the major characters, but Hamlin is able to elevate the portrayal through raw charisma. And, of course, Tina Majorino and Amanda Seyfreid do beautiful things with two very different young women. I could go on, but these are the big ones. These are the characters who stick, the ones we miss when they're gone from the screen. Except, of course, for our two heros.
What to make of Jason Dohring? I don't know if you can call him a good actor. The ticks are too predictable. One too many shots of him staring into space, lip quivering, in place of actual recognizable emotion. But sometimes…. There's a genuine quicksilver wit in certain scenes, shot through with the rage that's his defining trait in the early going. Later, that anger turns to tenderness, fear. The ape recognizes mortality, hers much more than his own. In the scenes with Bell, crackling chemical energy. You watch and are perpetually amazed when they don't tear off each other's clothes. I wonder about Dohring. There's much of Brad Pitt in his performance, the young and sleekly dangerous version. I wonder why he hasn't been bigger. This is Logan's story as much as Veronica's, and the pain in his eyes in that cafeteria is something to behold.
But of course, there's pain everywhere in this world. So much failure. At least Logan has the sense to realize that, if he must fail as he trys to win Veronica back, he's going to give her a last gift before vanishing from her life. Veronica, you see, covers her ignorance and naivete with agression. She's so focused on controlling the world that she forgets to see what others can offer along the way. She's agressively unpleasant in that absurdly appealing way, striding dramatically through the endless California summer. That, really, is what's so special about the show. We want to hug Veronica and slap her all at the same time. She's messy. We see the very last scene of the final episode, as sad as it is with all her mistakes hurting the one man she's always been terrified of disappointing, and we just hope she'll learn. Spoiler alert: Doesn't happen.
The movie, made and set years later, is a very odd beast. Fan-funded on kickstarter, chock-full of every cameo and winking joke any Marshmallow could want, and so pitch-black I'm impressed Thomas actually had the balls to make it. The plot is fairly rote. Logan, dead girl, blackmail, murder. Etc. Rote and perfunctory. That doesn't matter. The movie is about an addict getting her first fix in a really long time, the rush hitting her veins along with the knowledge that she'll never, ever quit. And in case anyone thinks I'm reading in, just listen to Colantoni trying to reason his daughter back on that plane. The best moment is also the most telling, and it's exactly what you'd think. Logan and Veronica, speeding across a bridge, music blasting and lights flaring in the distance. Perfect. Too perfect. Too easy to fall back into it and never look up. That's where she goes wrong. So yes, the end of the film is exactly what everyone's always wanted. But it's not what anyone needs. Happy, yet tragic, just like life. Few creators would have had the courage to end things that way. Rob Thomas, take a bow.
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