Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars Read online

  And they were right.

  Daddy's Girl

  IKE GREAT TV series from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lost, Veronica Mars is a kaleidoscope for the imagination. It can be viewed as a coming-of-age drama, a private-eye spoof, a Southern California soap, or a mystery yarn. But when I lift the scope to my eye, what I see is a love story, about two people whose bond has withstood time, tragedy, and heartbreak-as well as potty-training, puberty, broken curfews, driving lessons, and college entrance exams. Yes, Veronica Mars is the love story of a father and a daughter, and any teen romance pales in comparison.

  Until you actually have kids, it's hard to get your head around the bone-deep, scary-insane devotion and anxiety they can dredge up out of you. The writers of Veronica Mars, and actor Enrico Colantoni, who plays Veronica's father Keith Mars, perfectly convey the desperate humor of it all: parenthood gives you permission to fall madly in love with someone besides your spouse, but it wraps up this gift in a big box of shiny nightmares tied with knots of worry. "I'm thinking of getting you some sort of giant hamster ball, so you can roll everywhere in this protective sphere," Keith wearily told Veronica after she survived one of her frequent brushes with danger. "Nobody likes a blonde in a hamster ball," she snarked ("Happy Go Lucky," 2-21). Heh. Kids.

  Veronica and Keith's relationship has been strengthened by shared ordeal. According to the backstory recounted in the series pilot, the Mars family-Keith, wife Lianne, and Veronica-was once comfortably settled in Neptune, an affluent (fictional) San Diego suburb. Keith's position as town sheriff brought them respectability, even if it didn't raise them into the true socio-economic elite. But it all ended the year before, when Keith bungled an investigation into the murder of Veronica's best friend, Lilly Kane. Keith was (mistakenly) convinced that Lilly was killed by her father, computer magnate Jake Kane. Keith was voted out of office in a Kane-backed special recall election, and he and his family became outcasts. Lianne began drinking heavily; she begged Keith to move them out of Neptune, and when he refused, she left home, abandoning her husband and daughter.

  When we first see them in the series opener, Keith and Veronica are still living in Neptune, defiantly meeting public disgrace head-on. They've moved into a fifties-tacky apartment building (the bank took their house), Keith has hung out his shingle downtown as a private investigator, and Veronica works after school as his secretary, when she isn't doing some sleuthing of her own. Keith is the only constant left in Veronica's life. He blames himself for the fact that she is now motherless, but Veronica doesn't see it that way. "The hero is the one that stays," she told him succinctly in the first season episode "Meet John Smith" (1-3).

  It's clear that Veronica is her father's daughter, and that she always was, even when her mother was around. Veronica shares Keith's sense of fairness and justice. In a humorous example of "like father, like daughter," Veronica found herself in the role of unofficial sheriff of Neptune High. Being a friendless pariah meant she had nothing to lose and nobody to alienate when she helped fellow outcasts and misfits fight back against bullies from the upper-class zip code ("09ers") and thugs from the wrong side of the tracks. Like Keith, Veronica is not impressed or intimidated by wealth or social status, or by people who throw their authority around. As father and daughter demonstrate in their jolly tag-team put-downs of Keith's successor, the arrogant and jerky Sheriff Don Lamb, they have no fear of speaking truth to power. They both know, from Keith's experience being hung out to dry over the Lilly Kane murder, that money and power corrupt.

  Veronica and Keith share decidedly proletarian tastes-pizza and The South Park Movie on the DVD player is a perfect night for them. Their un-extravagant gifts to one another reflect the goofy face they put on their reduced circumstances; she baked him a lopsided birthday cake, he bought her a used waterbed at a yard sale ("Come on, you've wanted one of these things since you were, like, five years old!") ("Drinking the Kool-Aid," 1-9). Veronica and Keith are not ashamed of being almost poor in a place where wealth counts for everything, although Veronica does carry a grudge against the 09ers who were once her friends and who shunned her after her father's fall from grace. Still, when Keith fretted about how his mistakes have affected Veronica's life, she breezily reassured him, "Are you kidding me? You're the best father in the world! I mean, come on, look at me. I'm healthy, happy, good grades, all my own teeth, fancy shoes..." ("A Trip to the Dentist," 1-21).

  A couple of episodes into the first season, just as Veronica was getting comfortable in her new identity as the anti-09er, the possibility was raised that Jake Kane, not Keith, was Veronica's biological father. This development dissolved what little fairy dust remained in Veronica's eyes after all that had happened to her family. Nothing was what it seemed, nothing could be taken for granted, and Veronica started to view her own life, her own identity, as a mystery to be solved. How did all the little pieces-feelings, memories, beliefs, actions-come to be arranged into the puzzle called Veronica Mars? She wondered what her life would be like if Jake really were her father. She re-examined her feelings about money and social class and about losing the modest social standing she once held with her peers. She questioned the meaning of family itself, of what the ties that bind are really made of. And she found her answers in the parental love and responsibility Keith has demonstrated every day of her life.

  In the first season episode "Drinking the Kool-Aid," Veronica destroyed the results of the secret paternity test she ran on Keith without reading it. (It was later revealed that Keith took a paternity test, too, and he is, indeed, her father.) In voiceover, Veronica told us, "I sent off for those test results because I wanted the truth. But can a lab tech really see the shape of my soul in a drunken conga line of genes? Jake Kane could be my father. But whether he is or isn't, would I really claim him as such and deny the man who raised me?" When Veronica decided to ignore the paternity test, she was not merely choosing to stick with the man who raised her. She was choosing to stick with the man who molded her, who taught her the meaning of family, loyalty, love. She was rejecting Jake Kane's values-he hid evidence incriminating his son Duncan in Lilly's murder and instead bribed a former employee to take the rap-in favor of Keith's values. Her values.

  As the story of a girl detective living with her single father, Veronica Mars often recalls the Nancy Drew mysteries, but with a spiffy wit and nerve that puts an unmistakably modern edge on things. Oh, there are times when Keith goes all Old School Dad on Veronica, angrily reprimanding her for testing the limits of his trust and indulgence. But for the most part, Veronica and Keith's relationship is unusually harmonious, open, and relaxed for a TV depiction of a parent and teen. It's so open and relaxed that Keith's sometime-girlfriend, Alicia Fennell, suggested that he's too trusting and permissive. "She's not your average seventeen-year-old," Keith explained to Alicia, who replied incredulously, "How can she be, when you treat her like she's forty?" ("A Trip to the Dentist").

  Alicia might have a point. Veronica and Keith's relationship is more like a partnership than a parent-child hierarchy. Their intimacy is apparent in the way they talk to each other, a peppy patter crackling with mock put-downs, inside jokes, and pop cultural references to everything from 1940s detective movies to Springsteen songs. In another measure of their closeness, Keith lets Veronica into his often seamy work world, showing her the ropes of investigation as if grooming her to take over the family business. He swallows his anxiety and lets her handle some cases on her own; they work side by side on others. On the home front, Veronica and Keith exhibit an earnest yet haphazard domesticity that reminds you of college roommatesor newlyweds. They take turns cooking dinner (if ice cream sundaes and canned chili can be considered cooking), and are fine-tuned to each other's moods, especially the lingering sadness of Lianne's betrayal and the family's public humiliation.

  In Veronica and Keith's domestic cocoon, Lianne exists as a sort of feckless ghost, a specter of disappointment and lost promise for both father and daughter. Veronica, perhaps, feels th
is more acutely; after all, she tried to bring Lianne home, used her college savings to pay for rehab, and was let down a second time by Lianne's inability to commit to sobriety and her family. Veronica is determined to prove that she's a better woman than her mother. Unlike Lianne, who ran when things got tough, Veronica stands by her man. Indeed, it's almost as if father and daughter have created a kind of surrogate marriage to replace the failed one between husband and wife.

  Not to imply anything icky, but there is sometimes an awkward sexual undercurrent to Veronica and Keith's self-consciously ironic banter. You won't find an exchange like this (from the second season opener "Normal Is the Watchword," 2-1) in any Nancy Drew book:

  KEITH: So, senior year. How was your first day of school, honey?

  VERONICA: Great! I beat up a freshman, stole his money, and then skipped out after lunch.

  KEITH: What, no premarital sex?

  VERONICA: Oh, yeah.... But don't worry, Dad. I swear you're gonna like these guys!

  KEITH: That's my girl!

  Clearly, Veronica and Keith's wicked parody of an innocent fatherdaughter heart-to-heart is just their way of talking around the elephant in the room, Veronica's burgeoning maturity. Although he tries to be a cool, progressive dad, Keith is as uneasy about his daughter's sexuality as Mr. Drew must have been about Nancy's, back in the Dark Ages. But, let's face it, there is also something fascinatingly transgressive about Veronica and Keith joking about her implied promiscuity. And the vibe gets even stranger as the above exchange continues, and Veronica and Keith seamlessly shift into a housewifeand-breadwinner routine:

  VERONICA: I missed you.

  KEITH: Aw, I missed you too. Now, where's my turkey pot pie, woman?

  Parent, child, husband, wife, partner, roommate, best friendVeronica and Keith play a jumble of roles within their relationship. They are all things to each other, much like lovers or spouses are in the intensely inward-focused first phase of their union.

  Veronica and Keith's pantomime marriage is all subconscious, of course. But it sets in play very real actions and emotions. Jealousy arises when they begin to seek romantic partners; they have difficulty relinquishing ownership of each other's affections. Not that there's anything unusual about Keith flashing icily intimidating smiles at Veronica's various beaus, or opening the door to cut short front-porch goodnights-that's all pretty normal stuff, filed under the heading of Dads Who Can't Handle It When Their Daughters Start Dating. But there is something a bit weird about Keith and Veronica using their private eye skills to run background checks on each other's romantic interests; it calls to mind suspicious spouses checking up on one another for proof of infidelity. When Keith started dating Rebecca James, the Neptune High guidance counselor, a petulant Veronica dug up the woman's criminal record and threw it down in front of her father as if in triumph. Her refusal to share Keith with another woman suggests that she has been at least partly conscious of assuming Lianne's wifely role all along, probably in hopes of preventing Keith from seeking a real replacement and closing the door forever on a Mars family reconciliation.

  There is an obvious, and amusing, Freudian element to Veronica's open hostility toward the idea of her father dating, and Veronica Mars delves deep into this fertile psychological terrain.The show provocatively acknowledges and explores the enduring theory that the quality of a girl's romantic attachment to her father sets the stage for all of her future relationships with the opposite sex. And Keith is going to be a tough act to follow Throughout the first two seasons, Keith is depicted, much of the time through Veronica's perspective, as the perfect man. He is dependable, protective, loving, unselfish, strong, true. His virtues stand out even more sharply because he is pretty much the only morally upstanding adult in Neptune. (The town is a soapoperatic hotbed of murder, pedophilia, adultery, and child abuse that cuts across socio-economic lines.)

  This idealized Keith fits the larger-than-life image girls form of their fathers in childhood. And Keith proved himself a father worthy of hero-worship in the climax of the first season finale, "Leave It to Beaver" (1-22). All hope seemed lost for Veronica as she lay trapped in a junked refrigerator that was about to be set ablaze by Lilly's killer, pervy movie star Aaron Echolls. She screamed for her father's help, and Keith came to the rescue, brawling with Echolls and then diving into the flames to free Veronica. "I love you so much!" Veronica cried as she cradled her injured father. "I knew you'd come! I knew you'd save me!"

  Intriguingly, Veronica and Keith behave nothing like partners or pseudo-spouses during this climactic showdown with Aaron Echolls. We are starkly reminded of the real nature of their bond as they revert to the basic parent-child roles of protector and dependent-Keith unhesitatingly hurtled through fire to rescue Veronica, Veronica instinctively cried for his help. Veronica, too, seemed to emerge from this trauma with a new, more mature understanding of her relationship with her father. She realized that their bond as parent and child is something that stands apart from, and can't be destroyed by, the love they might feel for other people. She saw the foolishness of her childish illusions of keeping Keith all to herself. At the end of the episode, Veronica laid down her resistance to Keith having a romantic life and bestowed upon him an olive branch in the form of Alicia, his estranged girlfriend, letting Alicia take her place beside Keith's hospital bed.

  Veronica then went home, only to receive a late-night visit from her troubled sometime-boyfriend, Logan Echolls (the son of Aaron Echolls). Logan showed up at Veronica's door beaten, scared, and disoriented; he was jumped by the Neptune High biker gang and it looked as if he might have killed one of them in the fray. In a striking parallel to the scenes we witnessed of Veronica tenderly ministering to the injured Keith, it was then an injured Logan whom Veronica cradled; he was stretched out in her lap, arms dangling to the floor, Pieta-like, while she soothed him. This was not the last time Keith and Logan would be linked by paralleling imagery. But it marked a crucial point in the series, where Veronica turned her romanticized focus away from her father and began looking (perhaps not even consciously) for the man who would take his place.

  In the show's second season, set during senior year of high school, Veronica further embraced adulthood by having consensual sex for the first time (she was knocked out and date-raped in sophomore year). Her partner was not Logan, however, but her old boyfriend Duncan Kane, whom she dated in the happy times before Lilly Kane's death, and with whom she briefly reunited. Asserting her independence from Keith even more, Veronica dug deep for self-knowledge by snooping into her mother's high school career. She discovered that she is more like Lianne than she knew-she has inherited her rebelliousness. And Veronica kept a monumental secret from Keith: she helped Duncan abduct his and the late Meg Manning's baby girl and flee the country rather than let Meg's abusive parents raise her. When Keith discovered Veronica's part in Duncan's drama, his candid, trembling anger and hurt came as a shock to his daughter (and viewers); it was the first major rift we've seen in their relationship.

  But by far, the most telling clue that Veronica and Keith's relationship is changing comes in the second season finale, "Not Pictured" (2-22). In what was almost a replay of the first season's final episode, Veronica found herself at the mercy of the murderer she was tracking. But this time, Keith did not arrive to save the day. She was on a hotel rooftop, being held at gunpoint by Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas, the classmate whom she had unmasked as the Neptune High busbomber. Keith, meanwhile, was on a plane escorting the mayor, a fugitive child molester, back to Neptune to face justice. And Beaver had placed a bomb on the plane. As the aircraft came into view, he detonated the bomb by remote control, and Veronica watched in agony as her world crumbled.

  Just as Beaver was about to pull the trigger on Veronica, Logan (with whom she was in a shaky truce following their stormy fling) burst onto the scene and took the absent Keith's place in the rescue scenario. A few moments later, there was an interesting sequence of scenes, beginning with Veronica in her living room
, sleeping Pietalike in Logan's arms-a twin image of Logan's pose from the first season finale. Then we saw Veronica dreaming of being a little girl watching Keith put on a puppet show; Veronica in her bed, awakened from the dream by the smell of breakfast cooking; Veronica running into the kitchen expecting to find Keith at the stove, only to find Logan there instead. At that moment, the supposedly dead Keith walked in-he wasn't on the mayor's doomed plane after all.

  The writers were doing a lot more here than just titillating fans of the Logan/Veronica pairing. The Great Logan/Keith Switcheroo depicted filial love and romantic/sexual love playing tug-of-war. Be ginning with the rooftop rescue, these scenes traced Veronica's subconscious transferal of the primal affections she felt for her father over to the mercurial Logan.

  On the surface, Neptune High's sarcastic, self-centered, poor-littlerich-boy seems to have nothing in common with Keith Mars, which is why it's such a shock when Logan borrows Keith's superhero cape to rescue Veronica. Veronica and Logan's on again/off again relationship seems to be one of attraction and repulsion. Veronica knows that Logan can be cruel, snobby, insincere, and a horndog. But he has also been abandoned by his mother, just like Veronica. And he loved Lilly-who was his girlfriend-as much as Veronica did. (And don't forget the possible, albeit debatable, soul-mate implications of those mirroring Pieta poses.)

  Veronica tried not to care for Logan, but she was hooked. Part of that was her inability to turn away from someone in pain. It's her nature to want to fix what's broken, just as she tried unsuccessfully to fix her own family by bringing Lianne home for that disastrous, brief reunion. And there's no doubt that Logan is broken. You'd be, too, if your father beat you, slept with and murdered your girl, and drove your mother to (apparent) suicide.

  When Logan replaced Keith as Veronica's savior in the second season finale, it was the fruition of that seed planted by the writers at the end of the first season, when they had Veronica leave her battered father's hospital bedside to comfort the equally battered Logan. It isn't just sympathy that draws Veronica to Logan, it's recognition: Logan eerily mirrors Keith's hidden but deep reserve of sadness, vulnerability, and anger. Logan is Veronica's irresistible mistake. He reminds her of Keith for all the wrong reasons.