Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars

by Rob Thomas

  Of course, the idea that Veronica and Keith's shared specialness makes them more believable might seem paradoxical; since when is extraordinary intelligence considered realistic and human, especially on television? But the Marses' alienation is genuine, even if their professional abilities are sometimes beyond belief. It doesn't really matter, either, if the Neptune biker gang accurately reflects California biker gangs throughout history, or if it's possible for a public high school to not have any unattractive students. It all goes toward creating a made-up environment utterly believable in its hostilitieshostilities with unreasonably high entertainment value. By planting its feet in the imaginary Neptune, Veronica Mars finds dual paths, to both escapist entertainment and emotionally true art. I'd like to think that even the Hell's Angels would approve.

  JESSE HASSENGER was born in Saratoga Springs, New York, a small town without an Irish mafia or a biker gang. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 2002 with a major in English, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His reviews have appeared in PopMatters, The L Magazine, and on filmcritic.com; his fiction has appeared in Me Three and Dirt, and he is a member of the Blackout Writing Collective. He enjoys many types of pie and rarely writes in the third person.

  RferentES

  "Market Whispers: Hell's Angels." The Independent on Sunday. 12 March 2006. 11.

  "Wiretaps Hear Revenge Plot in Biker's Slaying." Las Vegas Review Journal. 14 July 2003. 1B.

  "Priced-out Californians High-Tailin' It For Cheaper Digs." Daily News. 10 August 2003. Bl.

  Zhe urriting staff doesn't bat an eye when Veronica lies in an attempt to gain information from anyone she doesn't have a personal relationship with. When Veronica lies to Keith or Wallace or a boyfriend, we do have lengthy discussions about it in the writer's room. Whether an audience member forgives her or not, on those occasions we (and so, in turn, Veronica) are not being flippant about it.

  John also mentions Keith telling Veronica he wouldn't be able to trust her again. William Goldman relates an interesting anecdote in Adventures in the Screen Trade about how Susan Sarandon ruined The Great Waldo Pepper by being too good. When she died, the audience wouldn't or couldn't forgive Robert Redford. Everyone was too bummed to enjoy the rest of the movie. We suffered from a similar problem. Most audience members probably know that our episodes are written weeks ahead of when they're shot and months ahead of when they're aired. It's difficult to `fix" something midstream.

  I actually wrote that scene between Keith and Veronica, but it wasn't until I was directing it, and I saw Enrico and Kristen perform it that I had a moment of clarity about the consequences. Frankly, it was so much more powerful when I heard it performed than when I heard it in my head that I thought to myself, "Oh shit. That's gonna really resonate, and other than some lip service to it in the next episode, we aren't playing the ramifications of that moment."

  The resulting grumbling was deserved. As I said in the commentary about the previous essay on reality-I'm not trying to make our show about a teen girl detective absolutely "real," but I do want to hit the emotional truths, and not playing fallout from that discussion was a mistake.

  "I Cannot Tell a Lie.

  And If You Believe That..."

  0 YOU VALUE honesty in people? t

  Does it bother you when people, including yourself, tell lies?

  Do you think the world would be a better place if people were more honest with each other?

  It would take a very, for lack of a better word, honest person to answer "no" to those questions. Yet if you were asked to describe the eponymous lead character of the television show Veronica Mars, while several complimentary words would no doubt spring to mind-strong, resourceful, witty-you'd probably admit that the less flattering description of "liar" fits her as well ... or at least that she bends the truth very frequently. Not that she's alone in that regardin her noir world, almost every character we're familiar with has told a whopper at one time or another. But the point is, from what I know of viewers' opinions, including my own, we like Veronica. She's a sympathetic character. So how can we reconcile our positive view of her (and other rather less-than-honest characters) with the realization that lying comes as easily to her as her impossibly sharp and acerbic comebacks?

  On the brilliant and all-too-short-lived television show Arrested Development, one of the character Maeby's most memorable lines came when she noted to herself, "Okay, now I'm just lying for no reason." What makes that line real comedy is that very few people in truth or fiction actually do that. In Story, one of the definitive works on screenwriting, author Robert McKee tells us that true character is revealed in the choices we make under pressure. He explains, "If a character chooses to tell the truth in a situation where telling a lie would gain him nothing, the choice is trivial; the moment expresses nothing. If a character insists on telling the truth when a lie would save his life, then we sense that honesty is at the core of his nature."

  Veronica's core is clearly not as impossibly pure as that of McKee's example character, but what do the lies she utters and the deceptions in which she engages tell us about her true character? Let's start with the untruths that are most numerous-those she tells in pursuit of solving her one-off cases, or "Mysteries of the Week," as they're commonly known. It's tempting just to dismiss these lies as part of Veronica's job-if she told no lies as a private investigator, not only would she not get anywhere, we would have one boring show on our hands. And often, these lies are harmless-for example, in "Lord of the Bling" (1-13), Veronica amusingly posed as a hospitality clerk at a hotel in order to get some information from an unsavory rap star and his entourage. Only the most inveterate pearl-clutcher would castigate Veronica for lying in that situation. Similarly entertaining excursions into untruth occurred in "Betty and Veronica" (116), when Veronica posed as a student at the Bizarro Neptune Pan High, and "Green-Eyed Monster" (2-4), when she unsuccessfully set up a "temptation scenario" for a guy who turned out to be too good for his insanely jealous girlfriend. While these lies are often told in the service of justice, it's important to remember that they're just as often told in the service of Veronica's financial gain. Yet, despite the fact that many of us would agree that telling the truth should be more important than profit, these lies are typically forgotten as easily as the cases that prompted them.

  Sometimes, however, Veronica's deceptions can give us a little more pause. One such example came in "Mars vs. Mars" (1-14), when Veronica committed a serious invasion of privacy by telling an unawareas-always Duncan that her doctor was retiring, setting into motion a chain of events that led to her discovery of Duncan's secret medical condition. More unsettling was when she told the attendant at the bank that her mother had died, and produced a fake death certificate to boot, all for the purpose of gaining access to her mom's safety-deposit box in "You Think You Know Somebody" (1-5). Nothing evokes stronger emotions in people than death, particularly when said death is being related by an impossibly cute and distraught blonde teenager, and playing on a stranger's sympathies in that manner (reprised, to some degree, when she told a mechanic that she was the deceased Curly Moran's niece in "Cheatty Cheatty Bang Bang," 2-3, and when she told a wig-shop attendant that she was looking for her runaway sister in "The Rapes Of Graff," 2-16) for the sake of an errand that's ethically questionable to begin with isn't so easy to laugh off. Nor is it a laughing matter when Veronica's deceptions have unintended consequences-for example, when she used Deputy Leo's genuine and uncomplicated attraction to her to further her own ends. When her carelessness in leaving the evidence room unlocked led to Leo being suspended from his job for a week in "Silence of the Lamb" (1-11), the collateral damage Veronica's lies caused crossed the line from theoretical to disturbingly tangible. Of course, in this particular instance, the writers made it easy for us to forgive Veronica in light of the fact that she and Leo started dating very soon after this incident. Because if he can forgive her, we unconsciously think, why shouldn't we?

  And this is n
ot to say that, as silver-tongued as Veronica may be, she doesn't feel the occasional pang of remorse when she twists the truth into a pretzel. She told us as much in one of her patented voiceovers-VMVOs, as my typing fingers love me to call themwhen she said she felt awful about playing on Leo's feelings. But no matter how big the lie told, no matter how much the lie makes it a little harder for her to look at herself in the mirror, she convinces herself that her greater mission-finding her best friend Lilly Kane's killer, in the first season-is worth the ethical price. And indeed, that seems to reflect her more general feeling about the falsehoods she tells in service of her cases: lies told in pursuit of the truth are acceptable. Moreover, the greater the stakes of the case, the greater and more damaging the lies it's acceptable to tell. It's an ethical matrix that's certainly logical enough, if somewhat unsettling to find in a teenaged girl. But it's not the logic that makes lies told in pursuit of the truth acceptable to us as the audience-it's the belief in Veronica's ultimate goal. Who among us didn't want to see Veronica solve her rape? Reveal Lilly's killer? Find her mom? (Okay, in retrospect, two out of three ain't bad.) The point is, somewhere deep down, we understand that some degree of sacrifice is necessary to solve such tangled mysteries, and the truth is not going to escape unscathed. We mentally give Veronica license to lie, as long as she doesn't abuse our generosity. And when she does abuse it, we notice. For example, when Wallace asked about Logan's use of an untraceable tardy slip in "A Trip To The Dentist" (1-21), Veronica lied that she gave it to him so they could go over some details of his mother's case, when in fact, unless said details were to be found on the roof of Logan's mouth, she simply wanted to fool around with her clandestine boyfriend. And while said fooling around may have caused a significant percentage of the viewing audience to swoon with delight, even the most diehard Logan/Veronica fan had to be disturbed by Veronica's bald-faced lie to her best friend, which was told in the service not of truth but of shame. (She apparently made up for it with a tearful confession later that episode, but since it happened off-screen, it was somewhat lacking in emotional resonance.) The point is, that lie was worse than any lie told in service of her cases, for two reasons: One, it was motivated by less-than-honorable intentions. And two, could you lie to Wallace while looking him in the eye?

  Well, then again, maybe you could, if the situation were right. After all, Wallace's upstanding mother Alicia looked Wallace in the eye and told him that his father was dead. Obi-Wan Kenobi might say that what she told him was true, from a certain point of view, but even he would have to admit that it wasn't the whole story-the man who died was Wallace's adopted father; Alicia had fled from his natural one before Wallace was born. Said story culminated in Wallace skipping town with his biological dad for several episodes, leaving Alicia to regret not telling her son the truth. But we understand why she liedshe was trying to protect him. And some of Veronica's best lies, so to speak, occur when she's trying to protect other people. Sometimes the protection is physical, such as when she lied to the rather scary archery aficionado Harry that she was unable to find his dog's killer in "Nevermind the Buttocks" (2-19). She did so because she knew that Harry would most likely put a bolt between the eyes of her mortal en emy Liam Fitzpatrick, and while a VMVO admitted that she "wouldn't miss [Liam] " (most likely because he was within inches of decorating her face like an Irish cereal box in "Ahoy, Mateys," 2-8, and because he tried to shoot her father earlier that episode), she couldn't live with the thought of Harry going to jail for the rest of his life. Sometimes the protection is more emotional, as when Veronica told Abel Koontz that his daughter Amelia was happy. While the glib might point out that Veronica's statement is only true in that Amelia at that point is in, euphemistically, a happier place, Veronica chose to lie in order to give her onetime enemy a consoling thought with which to die. We not only understand Veronica's motive for telling these lies, but can't really even imagine not telling them were we ourselves in her situation. These lies reveal pieces of Veronica's true character, and in turn, our identification with Veronica reveals pieces of our own.

  And said pieces of Veronica's character, like those of so many good characters both real and fictional, often conflict. Nowhere is that more evident than in "Donut Run" (2-11), the episode in which Veronica lied so big that for the first forty minutes even the audience had no idea what was really going on. Veronica, sure that her thenboyfriend Duncan's child was unjustly going to be taken away from him, conspired with him and her private-investigator pseudo-nemesis Vinnie Van Lowe to get Duncan and his baby girl to Mexico one step ahead of the law. In doing so, she and Duncan faked a public breakup, led the FBI on a number of wild-goose chases, and even got the often-hapless Sheriff Lamb to unwittingly carry Duncan over the border in his trunk. Veronica gave up her boyfriend, risked taking on the FBI, and lied to everyone, including the viewers, because she simply couldn't accept how unfair the world can be, a trait of hers that resurfaces time and time again. (The term "vigilante" is often used to describe Veronica, but that's a whole other essay) In service of her single-handed mission to right the wrongs that unfairness creates, she lied. She even lied to her dad, leading to an emotional scene wherein he told her he could never trust her again. Many viewers rather grumpily noted that he seemed to forget about this declaration immediately afterward, which is certainly a fair point-while we expected that "never" would turn out to be an exaggeration, we didn't expect the argument to seem as if it had been forgotten by the next episode.

  But before we castigate the writers too quickly for forgetting how they portray Keith from week to week, it's worth wondering whether he (if he really existed, I'm not delusional) might have let go of his resentment and mistrust because he thought twice about that little speech, more specifically to ponder this question: Does Keith bear some of the responsibility for his daughter's untruths? Because regardless of whether you believe in nature or nurture, you'll admit that when it comes to lying easily, the phrase "Like father, like daughter" has rarely been more aptly applied. In the second episode of the show, "Credit Where Credit's Due," Veronica and Keith (highly entertainingly, it must be said) teamed up and posed as a pregnant teen and her irate father to convince a hotel receptionist to give up some vital information. But since this lie ultimately resulted in Paris Hilton's comeuppance, no one's likely to remember it in any way other than fondly. Similarly, when Keith posed as a DEA inspector to aid Veronica in bringing down a pair of criminal techno-geeks in "The Wrath of Con" (1-4), one couldn't help but feel that these lies were told in the service both of heartwarming father/daughter teamwork and of justice.

  However, lying is a slippery slope, and when Keith and Veronica bring their lies to bear on each other, we stop cheering and start feeling uncomfortable. Keith was portrayed as a liar in Veronica's eyes in the very first episode of the series, when he told Veronica that a license plate she photographed belonged to someone involved in corporate espionage when in fact it belonged to her mother, whom Keith knew Veronica was desperate to find. Veronica also learned in the pilot that Keith was still investigating Lilly's murder, when he had both officially and to the best of Veronica's knowledge dropped the case months earlier. Veronica, via VMVO, speculated that perhaps Keith was lying in an effort to protect her, but these bombshells make us feel that the importance of honesty is not a value that father is clearly imparting to daughter. Indeed, that Keith and Veronica keep their own counsel even when it comes to each other has been an ongoing theme throughout the series, although Veronica deserves credit in "Return of the Kane" (1-6) for telling Keith that she didn't want their relationship to be, as she put it, "[their] own game of Spy vs. Spy." You might point out that some of said credit has to be repossessed for offenses like infiltrating a cult against Keith's express orders in "Drinking the Kool-Aid" (1-9) and sending him a misleading picture to convince him she was in an art gallery instead of investigating Amelia DeLongpre's disappearance in "Rat Saw God" (2-6). But would she be Keith's daughter if she did otherwise?

&n
bsp; And the question of Veronica's parentage brings me to the last famous example of lies told in the relationship between Veronica and Keith. In "Drinking The Kool-Aid," Veronica lied that she needed a sample of Keith's blood for a health assignment, when in fact she planned to use said sample for a biological test to determine once and for all if Keith is her father. Frankly, it's a shocking violation of trust, even for this show Of course, Veronica decided not to read the results at the eleventh hour, leaving it to Keith to pull a similar invasion of privacy on Veronica later in the season. And as we all know, in "Leave It to Beaver" (1-22) when Keith produced the paternity results that proved he is in fact Veronica's biological father, the resultant outpouring of emotion yielded one of the most touching moments of the series. Looking at the happy ending, it's tempting to wonder what the problem was-why didn't they just go get tested together, rather than resort to these underhanded shenanigans? The answer is obvious when you think of what would have happened if the test had come back the other way. Despite Veronica's assertion that she was ready to make Jake Kane cough up enough money to send her to Stanford for the next 100 years, I think Veronica was planning to keep that knowledge to herself-to bear a heavy burden to protect Keith from a heartbreaking realization. She couldn't go through with it, leaving it to her stronger father to face doing the same for her. In their own way, these lies are an expression of love, and, viewed in this light, make Keith and Veronica appear almost admirable for telling them.

  Ultimately, it behooves us to remember that Neptune is a noir universe, and even a mostly beloved character like Logan can reprehensibly twist the truth, such as when he told Hannah he liked her when really he was only using her to influence her father to drop his testimony against him ("Ain't No Magic Mountain High Enough," 2-13). (Yes, his feelings eventually changed. Duly noted.) But we still don't generally think of Logan as dishonest, because he only lies when something big is at stake for him. In contrast, a lie that on the surface was far more innocuous was nonetheless seized upon by many viewers: Duncan told Veronica he was studying for a Latin quiz when in fact he was watching television ("Green-Eyed Monster," 2-4). Viewers use this incident to label Duncan as shifty and dishonest, despite the writers' assertions in the press that Duncan is supposed to be a nice, upstanding guy. The branding of Duncan with the "L" word as a result of that incident may seem like an extreme overreaction, but it all goes back to McKee's rule-by extension, if a person lies when he has nothing to lose by telling the truth, he's a liar by nature. Veronica, in contrast, never lies for no reason. She lies for good reasons and bad reasons, but usually, she lies because she thinks that lying is the right thing to do in the given situation. And the fact that we find her sympathetic, and even cheer her on, suggests that we understand and condone this behavior. So have we learned anything from this walk down the road of good intentions? If we look within ourselves, I think we'll find that despite the fact that we all profess to value honesty, lying is not only part of human nature, but a fundamental and necessary part of the human condition. And if anyone tells you otherwise? Don't believe a word he says.