Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars

by Rob Thomas

  Discussion question: At the end of one of our big mysteries would fans of the show prefer we have Veronica call the sheriff's department to arrest the bad guy, or put Veronica in harm's way? One choice is the "reality" choice; the other is the "heightened" choice. I submit that most people would choose the latter

  I wonder sometimes if our audience thinks we're getting away with TV constructs. I'll give an example. Our dorm rooms are two to three times larger than any dorm room I had in college. We need the space. Great big cameras are rolling around in there with operators and sound people. When I read the comment, "No one has a dorm room that size," I wonder if the poster thinks we don't know that. I also wonder if the audience would prefer a tiny dorm room if they knew that while it would be truer-to-life-every time we shot in the dorm room, we'd be forced into the same camera angles. There would be little to no possibility of original blocking of a scene.

  We certainly strive for reality in terms of asking our audience to believe the motivations, reactions, and behavior of our characters, but do I know when Veronica has time to do her homework? Not really. We attempt to be consistent with our version of reality-what we'll believe in Veronica's world. I don't want to imply that reality isn't important to me. It is. It's just that I'm only trying to achieve a swallowable TV reality. I'm not trying to make it as real as my own (relatively) uneventful life.

  I'm pleased to see that, for Jesse, we do land in that nexus of escapist entertainment and emotional truth.

  Reality on Mars

  and Neptune

  ELEVISION ISN'T REALISTIC. That much we know. New York City apartments are not cavernous; friends, rivals, and in-laws do not trade quips on a daily basis; doctors are not uniformly attractive; vampires do not exist. Even the genre called "reality" isn't particularly believable, unless you're frequently afforded the opportunity to eat yak testicles for money.

  Once in awhile a show will come along and display a modicum of realism; usually, swift punishment is in order. Television professionals look on in horror as shows like Freaks and Geeks or I'll Fly Away begin a death march almost as soon as they premiere; the terrified result is that even many of the best shows traffic in some degree of implausibility-from storytelling conveniences to the physical attractiveness of the characters-if you snap yourself out of the sexy fun spell they cast over you. In a way, these leaps of faith are even more audacious than the well-documented feats of ridiculousness performed by Hollywood movies, because television can demand a recurring suspension of disbelief of up to six, twenty, or 200 hours, depending on how long your program of choice manages to survive. That survival, in turn, may depend on how well a show can entertain the largest amount of people for the longest amount of time without going too far over the top-which leaves some shows scrambling desperately to float in some kind of mid-air compromise between entertainment and restraint.

  It should come as no surprise that this recurring suspension can leave viewers in a fog, unable to discern how realistic a show actually is. I had long suspected, for example, that much of Veronica Mars is patently absurd. I'm not even talking about Veronica's impossibly frequent snappy comebacks, or her ability to, as a teenager, find weekly stand-alone mysteries and solve them with prompt professionalism (augmented by frequent snappy comebacks). These are familiar television conceits: the wittier-than-life dialogue, the sexier-than-yours mysteries of life (Veronica never spends an hour looking for anyone's car keys; we're supposed to find her adventures entertaining, after all). It's the world of the show that spins my head-the made-up town of Neptune, California.

  The central conceit of Neptune is that it's a "town without a middle class"-an area where a bunch of millionaires and their kids clash with the lower-class citizens who often work in servitude to said millionaires and children thereof. The less privileged citizens of Neptune are not content with random street crime, though. Not only does this California town boast an Irish mafia of sorts (the Fitzpatricks, natch), but that crime family has a tempestuous relationship with Neptune's very own biker gang, nicknamed the "PCHers" after the Pacific Coast Highway. Yes, these teenage PCHers wear leather jackets. I don't even know why you asked.

  Neptune's rich kids are no slouches when it comes to outlandish behavior, either; spend one school year in the vaunted 90909 zip code and you'll witness kidnapping, drug deals, pet murders, breaking and entering, and long cons that outwit the FBI. And these are just the B-stories. (The PCHers seem almost too distracted by their sweet rides and camaraderie to compete with this level of mayhem.)

  All of these wealthy shenanigans at least sort of explain Neptune's thriving private-investigation subculture-this small town sustains at least two-though I'm still not clear on the database subscriptions that give said private eyes access to all manner of informational shortcuts-just enough to keep the crime-solving well under an hour.

  I'm not being flip; I really have no idea, during a typical episode of Veronica Mars, whether it's remotely possible for Veronica to track a license plate or a credit-card bill online through a private-eye Web site, or whether the Irish mafia has really been able to gain a significant foothold in coastal California. It's just a sneaking suspicion that the show is snowing me-followed by guilt, like I'm accusing my best friend of exaggerating about his road trip to Tijuana.

  So before I can really assess the realism of my beloved Veronica, I turn to my own middling detective skills to get the facts of the case straight. This never happened during, say, six years of lazy on-andoff Dawson's Creek viewership, possibly because the facts of the show disappeared into the ether shortly after each episode. But the sleuthing of Veronica Mars is infectious.

  First stop: the most commonly called-out anachronism on the show, that pesky biker gang. A quick scan of news wires for biker news turns up a lot of Hell's Angels stories. This seems logical, though I wonder if a younger, PCH-level biker gang finds this sort of coverage disproportionate and biased towards baby boomers, like how Rolling Stone still puts rockers from the sixties and seventies on its covers. I do find one story that mirrors a Veronica Mars plotline in which PCHer Felix is murdered and PCH leader Weevil goes on a half-season-long rampage to find the guilty party. In real life, a Hell's Angels member was murdered in California, possibly by another biker gang called the Mongols, and Hell's Angels members "sought revenge in California and Nevada," according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. However, perhaps due to their boomer prosperity, the Hell's Angels apparently utilize more sophisticated equipment than their youthful fictional counterparts: wiretaps reveal that members discussed using "night vision goggles, a firearm, and scope" to exact their revenge, far outclassing the PCH-preferred camera-phone and fists. Suddenly even the largestscale PCH ideas, like getting a betraying gang member chained to the radiator of a stadium earmarked for demolition ("Plan B," 2-17), seem downright primitive, rather than anachronistic. Let's split the difference and call them charmingly retro.

  At this point-the point at which I'm debating which methods of biker-gang revenge sound more realistic-I wonder if I'll ever feel qualified to evaluate the realism of any television show. Still, I press on. My search for information on Irish gang activity in California is even less fruitful; apparently, this "Irish mafia" business is much more popular in the United Kingdom. If the Irish are harboring a long-simmering conflict with motorcycle-riding teenagers, they have become adept at hiding it. Maybe that stuff about hating the English is just an elaborate cover.'

  Finally, on the subject of private-eye databases, I find a lot of ads for these types of information-rich databases-not exclusively for private eyes, mind you, but for the run-of-the-mill stalker with a couple hundred bucks to burn (in fact, the kind of guy that Veronica busts mercilessly on the show). I also locate an article from PC Magazine evaluating how scared you should be of such sites. The answer: kinda. Some are rip-offs, says the PC writer, but others happily provide social security numbers. I conclude that perhaps this aspect of Mars is semi-plausible, though the information retrieval pro
cess looks far less sketchy on a TV screen.'

  For the moment, my private-eye career seems stalled, my investigation inconclusive. On the surface, these various implausibilities just seem like more imaginative versions of TV's serial truth-bending. After all, the teen soap-a genre in which Veronica Mars could easily fit, what with the twenty-somethings playing high school seniors and its focus on the lifestyles of the rich, attractive, and scandalous-is especially, sometimes gleefully, prone to exaggeration. Teen dramas are celebrated and derided for their ridiculousness in equal measure; if anything, celebration has the edge. When smart-girl Veronica goes on and off with sensitive bad boy Logan, the show is dutifully falling in line with 90210, The O.C., and Dawson's Creek: gorgeous people enacting soapy hookups in the sun, as plot suds swirl around them.

  And teen shows have been just as happy to apply a tasteful dash of class-barrier lipstick, even-especially-if it wears off from all the making out. The O.C. has a boy of humbler beginnings living among a wealthy-elite not far removed from Neptune's upper class; Dawson's Creek's Joey was allegedly a struggling working-class tom boy-the kind whose family owns a bed-and-breakfast in a picturesque small town.

  Similar charges could be leveled against Veronica-that she's a hot genius detective who's somehow supposed to be disadvantaged. But the class tensions of Neptune simmer around her, backing up her occasional claims of hardship and easing up any potential narcissism. If the familiar circumstances of Neptune, California-sexy teenagers, warm weather, and the combustion of the two-render Veronica Mars far from documentary-like realism, they also keep the show equidistant from its less distinguished peers.

  One of the most distinctive aspects of Neptune, setting it apart from Capeside or any Orange Counties real or imagined, is its disappearing middle class-it's explained early in the series as a town where everyone's parents are either millionaires or work for millionaires. The literal lack of middle-income families in Neptune turns out to be less exaggerated than you'd hope. A 2003 Census Bureau report found that in the latter half of the nineties, more members of the middle class left the state than arrived, with demographers pointing to the state's record-high housing costs. Statistics on what percentage of these middle-class citizens were single private-detective fathers were not available, but real life nevertheless confirms (albeit more dramatically) Veronica's place in the middle, inhabiting a middle-class no man's land. If, after the events of the first season, it seemed to stretch plausibility that Veronica remained ostracized from the popular crowd, the series found a reasonable explanation for the show's status quo: no amount of dramatic catharsis, nor reunions with Duncan or Logan or any 09er, could extricate Veronica or her father from the middle-class squeeze.

  If class warfare alone doesn't provide enough nagging reality tugging on the show's fantasy, Veronica Mars has also found a clever way around the inevitable Hollywood glamour of a television show about sexy teens: by incorporating Hollywood into the world of the show, with at least one eye on the seedy underbelly at all times. While a show like The O.C. may rely on wish-fulfillment guest turns from George Lucas, the character on Veronica with the strongest Hollywood ties turns out to be one of the most unequivocally corrupt: raging, conniving, underage-girl-sexing, son-abusing, wife-alienating, Lilly Kane-murdering Aaron Echolls, also a movie star who, even af ter a fiery season-one unmasking, had no trouble beating said murder rap in court. The idea of glamour and sleaze as a sort of peanut butter and jelly of the rich is certainly a familiar one; look no further than the now-almost-yearly celebrity trial du jour. The lines between grit, sleaze, and glamour are in a constant, blurring flux; my biker-gang research even turned up an article about those badass Hell's Angels suing Disney for alleged use of its trademark to market an upcoming film.

  Before the Echolls verdict was delivered late in the second season, the episode "The Quick and the Wed" (2-15) introduced Tinseltown Diaries, an E! True Hollywood Story-style program that covered the Aaron Echolls saga in lurid detail; it popped up repeatedly throughout the season to trouble his son Logan. Other citizens of Neptune may have lousy lives, but Logan Echolls is always in the running for lousiest family, with a presumed-suicide mom, the aforementioned abusive and murderous dad, and a has-been actress half-sister, Trina, played with sloshy spite by Alyson Hannigan. Trina, like almost anyone on the show with a Hollywood life, is rich, semi-famous, and kinda pathetic; the show's parodies of entertainment-industry side culture and castoffs, embodied by Trina and Tinseltown Diaries, lack the inside-joke affection of countless other self-referential Hollywood productions. The seaminess underneath the well-kept appearances of Neptune also deepens Veronica's oft-voiced desire to leave her birthplace behind-another potential cliche sidestepped by the show Veronica doesn't want to get out because Neptune is a dead-end small town (though it is), but rather because it's an actively unwelcoming environment, a depository for faded movie stars and smug software kingpins. It's a land of opportunity exclusive to those who don't need, or deserve, any additional breaks.

  Neptune is also, then, a land of opportunity for the show's writers: the town is structured to hold both the outlandish stories required for weekly episodes and the class-conscious realism required for those episodes to be worth watching on a weekly basis. There is a crucial distinction when considering Veronica Mars: It may not always be realistic, but it rarely, if ever, goes over the top. A season finale can end with Veronica trapped in a refrigerator which an about-to-be-disgraced movie star prepares to set aflame, rescued at the last minute by her fist-swinging father, and yet a faithful viewer will not be think ing, Echolls would've just stabbed her in real life, or even, There's no way my dad could win in a fight with Harrison Ford. No, lucky fans of the show are free to simply enjoy the fisticuffs, perhaps with the side thought of, Well, that's what happens when you systematically remove the middle-class and offer tax breaks to the rich. After a year or two of immersion in Neptune, the coexistence of class war and juicy scandal doesn't seem ridiculous so much as, well, inevitable.

  Veronica and Keith strike a similar balance within Neptune itself. As private detectives, they are involved with the hot messes created by Neptune's wealthy elite, and as citizens they deal with the practical problems that their wealthy neighbors do not share. Their compact family unit comprises the heart of the show's middle-class struggle. Keith's presence in particular works as an antidote to the show's sudsier leanings. Many teen-centric programs marginalize parents as conflict devices (my parent doesn't understand my desire to fit in/stand out/attend college/not attend college) or sentimentalized supporting parts (my parents are splitting up/dying/teaching me more than I ever could have imagined), but Keith Mars is a constant in Veronica's life, much more so than her romantic relationships, the most successful of which would charitably be categorized as on-again, off-again. There doesn't seem to be room for much more; the prevalence of Neptune's soul-sick upper class infects even those who attempt to find their place in the disappearing middle. Look no further than Lianne Mars, if you can find her. Veronica's mother, former prom queen of Neptune High who married upstanding Keith, was missing throughout most of season one; she returned only to reveal her alcoholism and then, finally, treachery, stealing $50,000 from Veronica and Keith before disappearing again. Veronica and Keith may have an idyllic fatherdaughter bond, but the extent of their isolation is nonetheless clear. Neptune's merciless class system doesn't even have room for a family of three in the middle.

  The refusal to bring Lianne back into the fold is another example of canny realism used to maintain a TV-style status quo. It is more dramatic, of course, to have Veronica and Keith on their own (not to mention both single); it is also unrealistic to expect an alcoholic to recover quickly and happily. Veronica Mars finds realism in the corners of TV plotting; as if paying back its audience for these semileaps, it also finds drama outside of its flashiest plots.

  In fact, despite the barrage of twists, one of the show's most dramatic moments so far came with a small gesture; in th
e second-season episode "Donut Run" (2-11), when Veronica was questioned by police about a kidnapping plot and responded with her customary flip remark, Keith cracked down, banging on a table and ordering her to keep it serious. Their relationship is so believably affectionate and functional that Keith's outburst is startling even upon re-viewing, as is his stern loss of trust in Veronica by the episode's end, after he figures out her elaborate hoax, which not only fooled him, but also local and government authorities. In one of the show's boldest uses of misdirection, we're fretting over Keith's reaction even though we should be asking questions about the competence of these duped federal agents.

  The emotional gambit works. Veronica's near-fantastical detecting skills are directly attributed to her even more crack investigator of a father, so for Keith (and us) to see that craftiness turned against him creates a sensation not unlike the best superhero comics, where the super-powered deal in recognizable human emotions rather than grand, super-impossible feats of strength.

  Some fans of the show consider the lack of ramifications of the "Donut Run" rift throughout the remainder of the season to be a cop-out, but really, could anyone expect Veronica and Keith to stay apart? They're almost too human for interpersonal drama, their keen detecting brains having long figured out that no one else in Neptune truly understands them (almost literally, since so many middle-class families have apparently left town. In fact, come to think of it, the seemingly middle-class hacker girl Mac is also crafty to a degree that makes us question the skills of our own supposedly computer-savvy friends; this is either a scheme to subtly flatter a middle-class audience, or an even more insidious plot by the rich to make us all feel kinda lousy by comparison).